Spring in the air where you live? Down here in Nashville, Tennessee, nothing says Spring is just about here like a run up I-65 to Louisville, Kentucky, where I'll be next week, for the Mid-America Trucking Show.
Joining me from Overdrive here will be your friendly News Editor and custom-rigs specialist Mr. Matt Cole (look for him on the lot of the PKY Truck Championship as early as late Tuesday, March 19, next week) and video editor Lawson Rudisill, too (he'll be the guy carrying his own body weight in camera equipment all around the show). Likewise, all the way from Vermont, our own Alex Lockie, Executive Editor, will be walking the show floor or in the seminar rooms and elsewhere typing furiously, it's sure.
Probably a safe bet you might find me in similar positions -- there's a lot to like about the Pro Talks series this year, and much else happening at MATS besides. Here, several highlights, including some late-arriving additions to the schedule you won't want to miss.
We're a little partial to this one, granted. The new edition of the Overdrive/ATBS coproduction of the only start-to-finish handbook to establishing and running an owner-operator trucking business (in all the many forms that can take) is fast on the way to availability by mid-next week. At MATS, Overdrive's own Gary Buchs and ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted will walk session attendees through a market outlook for the rest of year. Likewise: An analysis of the past year's performance of owners, derived from cost, revenue and income benchmarking data from the tens of thousands of owner-op clients in the business services firm's network.
The goal: To get you thinking hard about your own business -- and deliver tactics and broader strategy to set yourself up to weather the rest of the down cycle and really take off when trucking markets turn to the positive.
Also at the session, meet Overdrive's current Trucker of the Year Jay Hosty -- we'll be presenting him with this year's trophy, a custom-designed scale model of his 2006 Western Star 4900EX (pictured) in lifelike detail, designed and built by
