"The goal of this program is to take one truck and figure out how to squeeze the maximum amount of profit out of that truck." --Kevin Rutherford on NASTC's "ROTC" joint effort with his business
Kevin Rutherford's Let's Truck and other initiatives are likely well-known to many Overdrive readers. We last heard his voice in Overdrive Radio from the conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies at the 2023 event. He made a case to small fleets and owner-operators in attendance for just how they might get through, even thrive in, the down freight markets. He was back at the NASTC event in Nashville in November last year with news of a joint venture with the association, bringing his focus through many years coaching owner-operators, and with tools like his ProfitGauges software and more ... news about how that singular focus would be coming to a NASTC work in progress.
As NASTC President Dave Owen noted at the conference in November, the effort goes by a nifty acronym, ROTC, or “Remarkable One Truck Company." (There's an alternate for that, too, Rutherford quipped during his and Owen's NASTC 2024 presentation: the "Rutherford Owen Training Curriculum.") The end product remains in the future, yet think of it as a new benefit to NASTC members or prospective members, and the product of a closer relationship Rutherford and Owen have built over a couple years now. These two leaders in small trucking hope to combine forces to help business owners with resources, tools and education.

"The number one reason for failure in small trucking is growth," said Owen. "And the number two reason for not succeeding, after you make the decision to get a second truck, is not growing."
[Related: A plan for better business: Why do you want to be an owner-operator?]
It's a paradoxical reality the association sees many one-truck independents fall prey to when they move beyond the single unit without the infrastructure to manage the biz when they’re no longer in complete control of the response to every single thing that can, and will, go wrong. NASTC exists to help provide that infrastructure, as Owen notes in today's podcast excerpting Owen and Rutherford's joint talk. Owen will join Rutherford for parts of his Certified Master Carrier training program at the Mid-America Trucking Show in March, and thereafter the pair hope to be able to fully launch the ROTC program as a training effort modeled on Rutherford’s long-running programs designed for one-truck owners to maximize efficiency and profitability. Further developing the curriculum as part of NASTC efforts to equip small fleet owners for successful growth, Owen believes, will allow for lessons learned be applied across any small fleet owner’s business to enable better competition with peers -- the big boys, too.
Owner-operators and nimble small fleets do in fact bring a cost advantage to trucking over their big-fleet counterparts in numerous individual cases, as Rutherford sees it. Driver pay and benefits end up costing an average 97 cents/mile combined for sizable fleets, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2024 cost analysis. Direct pay comes in at a rough average of 78 cents/mile. Separate all that from the overall $2.27/mile average cost for those fleets, and the resulting $1.30/mile figure makes clear in Rutherford’s mind the advantages the most-efficient owner-operators bring to the trucking table.
One owner in attendance at the NASTC session with Rutherford and Owen noted his cost to operate, not considering his own compensation, was below a dollar a mile, and Rutherford shared anecdotal examples of operators falling below even that. Again, that’s costs minus compensation for the driver.
We made a comparison using Overdrive’s fairly new Load Profit Analyzer calculator. It illustrates the profit difference between the $1.30/mile fleet average cost and the 97 cents/mile cost the owner-operator in the breakout session noted. I used a driver-salary figure of $485 per day for each calculation, based on 500 daily miles and ATRI’s average combined driver-compensation/benefits figure.
The profit result on a hypothetical four-day, 2,000-mile run offered at $2.25/mile is shown the comparison table below.
[Related: Take the wheel of Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer]
In the podcast, drop in with Rutherford and Owen for part of their talk detailing how they came together to dig into this work in progress in ROTC. Along the way, Owen shares his ideas about just how doubling down on an efficiency focus with independent owner-operators stands to benefit any trucking business as it grows beyond that single, Remarkable One Truck. Take a listen:
As mentioned in the podcast, Kevin Rutherford shared this form questionnaire designed to get you thinking about the areas where you want to improve when it comes to efficiency and business analysis, and signal your interest in the new NASTC ROTC curriculum.
Find more advice on a myriad of owner-operator business topics in the 2024 edition of the Overdrive/ATBS coproduction of the "Partners in Business" book. Download it here.