The semifinal-round judging is complete, and the dozens of small fleets who entered Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Championship starting in May this year are now just two in each division: 3-10 trucks and 11-30 trucks.
Finalists in each category will be recognized and square off for the title belt Oct. 23, 2025, at the annual conference of Small Fleet Champ sponsor the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Nashville, Tennessee. Without further ado, a big round of applause for the finalists!
In the 3-10-truck division:
- Now-11-truck Oberman Logistics, headquartered in Huntingdon, Tennessee, qualified for the 3-10-truck category at a total of 9 trucks as of the end of 2024, per contest rules. Owners Wes and Laura Oberman have contracted with two additional leased haulers for the all-owner-operator, mostly-platform-freight operation in the time since for continued growth. In a cycle where spot markets have been in the dumps for years and brokers oft-maligned for rock-bottom rates, the Obermans and owner-operator partners have excelled building profitable relationships with trusted middlemen. Read more about the Obermans.
- Clifford Hay Inc., based in Cobleskill, New York, makes the trip to Nashville after owner Clifford Hay II told the compelling story of a big rebuild of the fleet after a fire more than a decade ago took all of his powered equipment. He's persevered back to six trucks and a big collection of 30 trailers for freight diversity hauling lumber, dry van freight, and indeed hay, too, seasonally for direct customers. More about Clifford Hay.
Amongst the more sizable fleets 11-30-truck category, the 2025 Small Fleet Champ finalists are:
- Thomasville Furniture Xpress, out of Thomasville, North Carolina, is helmed by owner pair Scott Denmark and Scott Cruthis, both bringing to bear long experience in LTL furniture delivery on operations and maintenance sides of the house, respectively. Since Denmark and Cruthis started up in the early part of the pandemic, growth has been quick but manageable with an acquisition and continued reinvestment of profits in new equipment -- now to 17 owned trucks and 8 owner-operators leased. Read TFX's story.
- Turnage & Sons, LLC, is the 29-truck fleet of fourth-generation milk hauler Robbie Turnage and his wife and business partner, Lori, son Levi (fifth generation), and a close-knit all-company-driver team in addition to other operations staff in the family. There's something of a right-place, right-time aspect to Robbie's story of recognizing value in dedication to serving, early on, the organic-milk production niche for area dairymen in the region around the fleet's Tylertown, Mississippi, home base. To this day, though, Turnage's got a clear focus on laying groundwork for the business's future. More about Turnage & Sons.
Here's a huge congrats to all four of the finalists we'll see in Nashville in a few weeks! All are truly deserving of the honor, yet there can be only one to take home the title belt in each category, as have to date eight other fleets since 2020 -- we expanded from just a single Champ in 2022 to two categories.
Margins between these four and the remainder of the field among semi-finalists were tight, often the case for the Small Fleet Championship, now in its sixth year. You can read about all the semi-finalists via this link to the Small Fleet Champ main category page here at OverdriveOnline.com. There's plenty to glean in the tales and histories of this and past years' semi-finalists, finalists and winners, a big part of what we hope to deliver with the competition.
Namely, that's real-life stories of success in spite of adversity, with business brass tacks, novel approaches and best practices to get across the finish line profitably. Shown here are scenes from past finalist presentations at the NASTC conference dating back to 2021, when NASTC first hosted Overdrive as Small Fleet Champ sponsor. That first year, pictured top left, the team at Silver Creek Transportation took home the title. From there, clockwise, are 2024 3-10 truck winners Paul and Michelle Rissler of Paul Rissler Transportation, Butterfly Xpress' Bill Barhite and team celebrating onstage in 2023, and, finally, Chris and Lauren Porricelli of Sanford, Florida-based CAP Trucking after a big win in 2022.
This year's final round takes place during the conference's opening-night Transportation Trust Forum October 23 in the evening. Find the full conference schedule agenda via this link, and hope to see you there!
Read about the finalists and all fellow semi-finalists via this link.
