It’s been some kind of a year for Hell Bent Xpress owner Jamie Hagen. The South Dakota and Michigan-headquartered fleet he’s built from one truck over many years is back to 10 all-Mack power units after some reduction in the last, difficult year.
Hagen was among Overdrive’s Small Fleet Championship finalists in 2024. Along with past Small Fleet Champ Jason Cowan of Silver Creek Transportation in Kentucky, last year he was tapped for the opening panel discussion at the big Mid-America Trucking Show.
The pair of champs will run it back in that panel to set the stage for small-business issues at the big show again this year. It's on the MATS schedule for early the morning of March 26 to kick things off, and for this week's edition of Overdrive Radio Hagen delivers a bit of a preview of what we’re likely to hear there.
Safe to say you can expect no small amount of discussion of fuel economy and purchasing, given the last couple weeks.
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Hell Bent Jamie Hagen’s got a not-so-secret weapon in his fuel arsenal in one of the first Mack Pioneers to roll off the assembly line last year. He's got a driver in it at the moment as Hagen focuses with his wife and business partner, Hillary, on office duties.
[Related: Test-drive with a New Jersey turn in Mack's all-new Pioneer]
Jamie and Hillary Hagen, onstage during the Hell Bent Xpress finalist recognition in Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship in 2024
The Pioneer's spec'd for max efficiency pulling a van. The driver averaged 9.8 mpg for the last month. While that's a whole lot better than 5.8, Hagen noted, the Iran war and the diesel run-up since just wasn't "on the bingo card" planning investments with prospects for 2026.
Even with excellent efficiency, the fuel-price hike of the last two weeks virtually erased gains in brokered rates he'd seen since the Fall.
[Related: Diesel's price run-up eliminating owner-operators' recent rates gains]
It's all made him "gun-shy," to an extent, about future investments, given Hell Bent's push to ever-more-efficient equipment with five more Pioneers acquired last year to replace older units. As he put it, "you just never know when the bottom's going to fall out" with cost and revenue volatility as extreme as it's been.
With good direct freight and rates coming out of the Dakotas, a project this year will be to identity customers for the return trips to further cut the reliance on brokers, Hagen notes in this week's episode, where we touch on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's broker transparency rulemaking and other regulatory efforts, and much more. Take a listen:
[Related: What's happened to broker transparency]
Find more upcoming at MATS at the show website and in this collection here on Overdrive.
Hear the opening-breakfast small-biz panel discussion from the 2025 big show below or at this link.
