Overdrive June Trucker of the Month Scott Smith, owner-operator of Sapphire Cartage out of Searcy, Arkansas, has a couple secret weapons for bookkeeping, tax accounting and business analysis. The first is his wife, Stephanie, who after time in the health care field and then with Scott rearing four young children, found new work the owner-operator describes in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio. Stephanie's built accounting expertise in a support role for customers of a small-biz accounting software system, and her expert handling of the Sapphire Cartage back office has taken that load off of the independent.
The second of those secret weapons regular readers encountered in the June 30 feature detailing Smith’s business. Namely, it’s a custom spreadsheet the owner-operator built himself to effectively analyze per-ton rates and profitability when looking at brokers' load offers in the hopper-bottom freight business.
But not only that. The spreadsheet tool is his go-to calculator for week-to-week business performance as well. Smith uses the spreadsheet to set revenues against not only hard costs like those for fuel but his weekly home needs. He considers his own personal driver salary, if you will, what his needs to contribute to household take-home, on the expense side of the profit calculation, week by week. The system he describes in the podcast brings to mind in some ways Overdrive’s own Load Profit Analyzer tool you can access at any time to game out rate scenarios and/or compare load offers.
With that tool, using your own fixed cost per day, variable cost per mile and that self-pay salary figure per day, you too can set those driver-pay needs to be calculated on the expense side of the per-load profit analysis.
[Related: Calculate any load's cost in relation to time, not just miles]
For June Trucker of the Month Smith, though, it’s his own system that accounts for all of it -- indeed a now not-so-secret weapon I'd wager many owners out there could do well to emulate in whatever form works best for the operation. In the podcast, hear more about Smith's business and history trucking from the start, back in the early 2010s when he just happened into a love for the road via work in a different sector than the hopper- and flatbed-hauling work he does today. Take a listen:
Nominate your own or another business to contend, like Smith, for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award via this link. To read about all of our 2025 Truckers of the Month, access full coverage via the collection of contenders here.
