This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features the semi-annual ATBS owner-operator income benchmarking session delivered in late September by ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted. The audio contains the full presentation, and the video version up top shows all the slides along with it.
You can follow along with any audio-only version by downloading a bevy of detailed slides charting cost, revenue and income trends among ATBS's tens of thousands of owner-operator clientele at this link.
Hosted offers plenty in the way of trends analysis showing where we've been up to the present moment in the wider freight economy. Since the COVID run-up in freight and rates, though, I suspect most owner-operators know what the story's been. Hosted put it pretty plainly, looking at contract freight volumes and rates at a certain point in the presentation that you’ll hear: "Now we've been contracting in freight volume for the last two and a half years," he said.
It’s been about the longest contraction (though not always happening quickly these last years) that he and many others have ever seen. There’s hope in some ways for a turnaround, given what he called a measure of stability freight-volume-wise seen in some of the numbers lately. Likewise, hopes for a hit to trucking capacity via the Trump administration's foreign-domiciled driver credentialing rule changes -- or another factor. Not that Hosted plays much of the old prognosticating game this time around in the presentation.
[Related: Foreign driver exodus clearing parking lots and boosting rates?]
"I keep hearing 'middle of next year, second half of next year,'" he said, but "I've been hearing that for three years now. I'm tired of saying that. I don't know when things are going to get better," fundamentally. Control what you can control, he added, to rein in costs and keep an eye on generating revenue above and beyond them.
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"The important thing is when you hit that fixed cost, your profit per mile is through the roof," he said.
[Related: Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer: How to use to assess rates, costs]
Owner-operators analyze and track costs, revenues and profit in so many ways, but Hosted wagers close attention to the contribution margin could help anyone in decision-making around freight, and motivation to strike when the iron is hot, as it were, not in the freight market broadly but in the run of your own day-to-day business. Take a listen:
Download those ATBS presentation slides to follow along with the audio version via this link.
ATBS is coproducer of Overdrive's Partners in Business, a comprehensive guide (now in a dynamic online library format) to execution of an owner-operator career. The owner-operator business services provider is accessible directly via its website.
[Related: 'Foreign driver capacity' hit incoming? Fleets watch, as owner-op income back on a slow rise]
