With some of the signs flashing red, as it were, on the prospects of bona fide economic recession, the indicators remained mixed for owner-operator business performance as of a couple weeks ago, the time of ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted's year benchmarking presentation Overdrive originally reported on at this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business/article/15296973/ownerop-revenue-up-big-this-year-but-completely-offset-by-fuel Hosted will be familiar to regular readers from ...
Sep 30, 2022•50 min
it’s been a tough few weeks for small fleet owner Bryon Stoll of New London, Wisconsin. In today's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Stoll recounts the myriad things that went just right on his evening trip to the hospital for what turned out to be emergency surgery to clear a near total blockage of a coronary artery, the reason for the heart attack the 48-year-old longtime truck owner and operator was experiencing. Stoll, with his wife, Holly, heads up reefer carrier Surprise Trucking, wh...
Sep 23, 2022•37 min
Wade Bontrager, CEO of National Truck Protection, came to the now more than four-decade provider of used-truck warranties to owner-operators and small fleets owners around the time of NTP's 2018 purchase of Premium 2000, a fellow used-warranty provider. The following years have seen a systematic improvement process for the company, which still offers both NTP and Premium 2000 warranty brands but with a close focus on transparent contracts and more customer-beneficial practices that Bontrager lay...
Sep 16, 2022•38 min
When Florida-based small fleet owner Chris Porricelli started his CAP Trucking company as a one-truck business, he was still in his 20s, and struggled for the first six months. But 11 years into it today, the five-truck fleet has excelled in North-South LTL reefer lanes with mostly direct customers for produce headed north from Florida and South Georgia, and a bevy of commodities headed south. In this edition of Overdrive Radio, hear Porricelli's story in his own words, with part of our conversa...
Sep 09, 2022•36 min
In this Part 2 edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast featuring conversations with Owner-Operator of the Year Glen Horack, the Missouri-based hauler elaborates on themes of preparation broached in Part 1 last week. Asked for his most salient advice for any new or aspiring owner in this day and age, he made reference to the grand cyclical nature of the economy -- and trucking specifically of course. What goes up must come down. The owner-operator, leased with his 2022 Peterbilt 579 to Springfield...
Sep 02, 2022•22 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio features Owner-Operator of the Year Glen Horack, based in Elkland, Missouri, and so named in Overdrive’s coproduction of the awards program with the Truckload Carriers Association at the TCA annual conference in March in Las Vegas. Horack teams with his wife, Karla, a hauling partnership whose in-cab portion at least started after the one year -- 'knock on wood," Horack said -- his one-truck business truly struggled, 2008. The depths of the Great Recession. Runnin...
Aug 26, 2022•27 min
Ahead of Brake Safety Week 2022, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance weeklong outreach and inspection initiative focused on braking systems and starting this Sunday, Aug. 21, we're listening back to the 2021 Overdrive Radio podcast talk with Pennsylvania-based former local-department officer and long-certified DOT inspector Andy Blair. Looking at the landscape for commercial truck inspections generally, Blair sees plenty missed opportunities when it comes to troopers helping truckers to under...
Aug 19, 2022•50 min
Today we hand it off again to "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer to walk us through the moving, sometimes hilarious, writing of trucker-songwriter Coby Langham & the Citizen Band, whose 2019 “Years on the Road” record made plenty waves around his native Kentucky and beyond. Langham drives for likewise Kentucky-headquartered Downey & Sons, a pallet supplier out of Springfield, and he’s a proud father of three. Hear more of Langham's music via this link: https://open.spotify.com/album/3c5Vvtgk1sEh...
Aug 12, 2022•30 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio features a talk with Charlie Deull, third generation in the family behind longtime Broadway show hauler (among other touring acts) Clark Transfer, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Today, the company is principal in touring work all around the nation hauled by owner-operators leased on to the company, in addition to a network of outside agents, including many owner-ops and small fleets with authority among them, too. Deull we spoke to initially this Spring, and s...
Aug 05, 2022•34 min
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we'll drop into an interview Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole conducted with Arrive Logistics Chief Strategy Officer J-Ann Tio, about the broker-3PL’s “We Deliver Flexibility” program. The trial run for the program is getting its footing as a connection engine between independent owner-operators and small fleets in Arrive’s network and larger private fleets the company also does business with. The Arrive program, as Tio notes, hopes to alleviate iss...
Jul 29, 2022•37 min
Dayton, Ohio-based Airgas tank-truck operator Guy Archer has come out of his big win in 2021's Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search with renewed energy around his songwriting efforts -- he’s been much more than tinkering around the edges of those efforts with some recording activity this year we’ll hear him detail in this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, dropping in on Archer’s tour of a variety of songwriter stages at the Mid-America Trucking Show this past March. There, Archer ...
Jul 26, 2022•32 min
Gary Buchs -- longtime Overdrive contributor, former owner-operator now turned business coach for a myriad of both new and more experienced owners -- knows well of what he speaks with regard to the notion that first-time small business owners are like as not to fail that first time out. There's a reason he's where he is today after a successful owner-operator career, after all -- his first foray as a young man in agriculture didn't go quite so well. Initial failure doesn't mean, of course, that ...
Jul 15, 2022•25 min
The subject of retirement is always a hot topic among owner-ops -- the diligence it requires to set yourself up well to leave the road is such that it's not exactly easily achievable. Yet this well-matched pair of owner-operators -- Bruce and Kellie Cone of Redding, California -- have set themselves up well as they start to run out their last half-decade in business. That's the long-range plan, anyway, for the proud of owners of a pristine pair of Peterbilt 389s you'll hear all about in this edi...
Jul 08, 2022•36 min
It was 2017 when Mike Gaffin, aka "The Boston Trucker," received an email from Shell Rotella SuperRigs inviting him to join their team. Over the past several years, Gaffin, a second-generation operator with more than 30 years of experience behind the wheel, had been converting his lifetime love of trucking, and a decades long photographic curation of the business, into one of the largest followings on social media. His likes and views run into the tens of millions, driven largely by his huge You...
Jun 24, 2022•23 min
For this edition of Overdrive Radio, host Todd Dills is joined by Lee and Lisa Schmitt of Wisconsin. As regular readers may well be aware, Lee's requested as exemption from parts of the hours of service for himself -- it’s the first such exemption request for an individual owner we’ve seen hit the Federal Register and go up for comment, in quite some time, a testament perhaps to the methodical nature of the Schmitts' pursuit of it. It’s not like it's particularly difficult, though, to break thro...
Jun 17, 2022•35 min
Small fleet car-haul owner-operator C.G. Soza of California's Central Valley has quite a lot on his plate these days, not the least of which is the $7-plus diesel sign he saw early this week in Madera, California, a first for the owner. He's also keeping a close eye on the Supreme Court, which is set to conference June 23 and possibly make its decision as to whether it will take up federal pre-emption questions in the California Trucking Association's appeal of its case again the AB 5 state cont...
Jun 10, 2022•36 min
The question begged in the title here points us down the road to the subject of this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, a notion voiced quite well also in last week's edition by Breon Thomas when he noted that entrepreneurship, broadly, is about creating systems of support for your efforts at success in business. Systems, indeed, of support to ensure you negotiate the next load at a level of profit commensurate to keep the business afloat, feed and clothe and shelter the family back home, a...
Jun 01, 2022•26 min
The nimble nature of businesses working the expediting niche of the trucking world, particularly those powered by smaller pieces of equipment like cargo vans, is well-known to longtime industry participants. Atlanta-based Breon Thomas was initially attracted to cargo van expediting for that very reason, yet he quickly learned there was more to successful business ownership than working hard and running miles. Today, after telling his story and sharing with others frequently on social media, "Bre...
May 24, 2022•32 min
Does a truly "zero-emissions" truck exist? Is it even possible in today's petroleum-powered world? Will it ever be? If you’ve counted yourself among skeptics when it comes to the notion that trucking might one day be an industry built on the foundation of big lithium-ion batteries powering electric motors, Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole's report this week on new analysis from the American Transportation Research Instituate, or ATRI, probably raised your eyebrows a little higher, let’s say: http...
May 13, 2022•37 min
It’s official –- well, it’s been official for a good while now -– fuel is absolutely out of hand. Spot market rates for vans and reefers have been sinking, and big carriers nonetheless seem bullish on long-term prospects, for once in the last couple of years. These years have been a boon by and large for the small, even with COVID-inspired difficulties: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15115093/how-small-fleets-might-benefit-from-a-covid-vaxtest-mandate Market-to-market, though...
May 06, 2022•46 min
Cliffside Transportation Services operator Bobby Coffey-Loy hauls in a team with his husband, Ricky, and in one of a couple dozen or so rigs Cliffside has dedicated to XPO Logistics freight in the network. In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Coffey-Loy speaks to the mission of his and cofounders’ LGBTQ+ Truck Driver Network, established within the last year and engaged in a variety of support efforts for operators all around the nation: https://lgbtqtruckdrivernetwork.com/ Ricky and ...
Apr 29, 2022•21 min
In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, trucker-songwriter and Overdrive Extra contributing writer "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer takes us through his interview at the Mid-America Trucking Show last month with longtime entertainment-industry-specialized trucker Chip Warterfield, now in a safety and operations role with Upstaging, Inc. Warterfield tells the story of what happened to the company when COVID in 2020 essentially brought every single one of its touring clients to an abrupt and complete hal...
Apr 22, 2022•19 min
It’s "meet your regulator" day on Overdrive Radio -- there’s plenty to gain, particularly for those of you in the audience who engage with regulatory processes, in getting to know, of a fashion, FMCSA Acting Administrator Robin Hutcheson. For this edition of the podcast, we’ll hear Hutcheson speak at length to the notion of dwindling pride in trucking and investment in its restoration, plenty about her background, FMCSA's regulatory programs, and the agency's parking advocacy role, among other t...
Apr 15, 2022•57 min
As Georgia-headquartered owner-operator Raeshawn Lucas has it, higher earning potential as an owner-operator is certainly a prime motivating factor for the decision to strike out on one's own as a business in trucking. Yet that's certainly not all when it comes bedrock goals. Respect, freedom of choice in so many aspects of how you do business... Truth is, owner-operators go into business for themselves for all sorts of reasons, and that was well evident in the discussion we had at the Mid-Ameri...
Apr 11, 2022•29 min
It's been quite a while since the Overdrive Radio podcast has attempted to capture the vast dynamism of a trucking show quite like the one that took place for the first time in three years in Kentucky last week -- that's the Mid-America Trucking Show, MATS for short, of course. It'll be quite some time before we convey the full breadth of everything encountered there, but for today on this April Fool's Day edition of the Overdrive Radio we'll get to two aspects: first with the voice of a brand-n...
Apr 01, 2022•26 min
While we're busy covering the various comings and goings at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, this week, find in this week's podcast a window on the big awards banquet out in Las Vegas earlier in the week with the Truckload 2022 conference of the Truckload Carriers Association. There, Prime-leased Glen Horack took home the Owner-Operator of the Year award, making good on his fourth time as an award finalist. Robert Howell, driver for Doug Andrus Distributing, took home the C...
Mar 25, 2022•32 min
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, Trucker Nation's Andrea Marks voices what she says might be "unpopular" opinions about some operators' views around the new Entry Level Driver Training regulations, in effect since early February. Marks, also involved in the small fleet operations of her parents' and husband’s small trucking companies pulling livestock from a Colorado home base, calls herself a "huge proponent" of the new training regs, and though much of the trucking world, includ...
Mar 18, 2022•26 min
Every owner-op out there has an origin story for his or her entry into the trucking business, whether simple or windingly complicated ... or embellished for effect, as it were. That's no less true of this year's Owner-Operator of the Year award finalists, one of whom will take home $25,000 as this year's winner after the March 22 awards banquet at the Truckload Carriers Association's Truckload 2022 conference in Las Vegas. In this edition of Overdrive Radio, we’ll hear such tales and much more f...
Mar 11, 2022•32 min
The “People’s Convoy” continues to roll toward the area of the nation’s capital, at upward of 100 trucks as of yesterday, with multiple hundreds more personal vehicles as of Thursday, March 3, on a route to Ohio before a final trip into the D.C. area planned for Saturday this weekend. The convoy, as we’ve noted at Overdrive, has a stated aim of ending the national emergency footing on which the U.S. government has found itself the last two years as it relates to COVID: https://www.overdriveonlin...
Mar 03, 2022•25 min
As was noted in reporting last week, compliance consultants Jeff Davis (Fleet Safety Services) and Adam Wingfield (Innovative Logistics Group each pointed out that, despite the hopes of some, electronic logging devices have emphatically not delivered carriers from hours-related enforcement, particularly at the investigatory level when federal and state auditors come calling. A small fleet's own audits of drivers’ e-logs for unassigned miles and much, much more are still necessary tasks for the b...
Feb 17, 2022•27 min
