This week in the Overdrive Radio podcast, another entry in our 2025 Trucker of the Year competition. Regular readers may well have seen Matt Cole’s feature a couple weeks back now about longtime independent Ron Kelsey, who’s achieved something of an "owner-operator holy grail," as it were, trucking for decades now in a still-pristine modified two-stick 1981 Peterbilt 359 and hauling direct freight for customers that date back three decades for the owner.
Kelsey’s recent-history experience, too, stands as testament to the bedrock value of direct-freight relationships when the proverbial you-know-what hits the fan. With a "freight recession" ballyhooed by prognosticators time and again over the last three years, and spot rates down over the same period and no small number of owners feeling the pinch with rising costs, Matt Cole asked Kelsey how he’d fared through tough times of these recent years.
"I really don't notice a change," Kelsey said, on the ground with his two principal customers. That even as "I'm not No. 1 anymore" among independents hauling for them, he added, given as he's progressed in his career he's not quite as consistently over-the-road as he was in past years. Yet freight slowdowns haven't impacted him at all.
"I work when I want to work," and the loads are plentiful, always something available, loading pipe outbound from the Phoenix and most often steel on the return. Invoiced, customers pay within days, too, he said.
"I'm very fortunate," Kelsey added, but there's more to his business prowess than just following the tides of fate, as you'll hear in the podcast. He’s well-set-up to weather anything that comes, ultimately, and has come a long way himself from the young man who would end up inking a deal for his 1981 Pete after two-stepping with the owner way back in 1984. He’s hauled with it ever since, getting his authority 10 years later and building what the Kelsey's Trucking business remains to this day.
Hear his story in his own words in today's episode. It starts like many an owner-operator's story, in a straight truck in vocational operations before a trial by fire over-the-road in the late 1970s. Take a listen:
Nominate your own or another deserving owner-operator business for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award via this link. Entries are open through next month. Hear podcasts with all seven of this year's contenders thus far via the playlist below.
[Related: Ron Kelsey's 'Sunrise Express' 1981 Peterbilt 359 -- Antique champ in Pride & Polish]
