This week's edition of Overdrive Radio drops into our awards ceremony October 23, 2025, with four Small Fleet Champs -- the owners of Clifford Hay Inc., Thomasville Furniture Xpress, Turnage & Sons, and Oberman Logistics all on hand for the event in Nashville, Tennessee.
Before the dinnertime program got started that fine Thursday evening, I took the chance to sit down with all of the owners, with results in this wide-ranging roundtable talk around what TFX co-owner Scott Denmark pointed out was more of a rectangular table in fact. Be that as it may, a pair of Scotts (Scott Cruthis is Denmark's co-owner) is joined here by Clifford Hay and Wes Oberman, likewise Robbie Turnage, all swapping stories and biz advice in response to two principal questions:
- What's been your biggest business challenge in recent years, and how are you working to overcome it?
- What's the best piece of advice you might give an aspiring small fleet owner?
Topics range across matters of trucking insurance hikes, investment to handle tire maintenance in-house for sizable savings, and no small number of breakdown headaches and towing horror stories met head-on. Both Cruthis and Turnage own fifth-wheel toter tow hooks, giving the fleets capability to rescue a sidelined rig without getting dinged with a huge tow bill (and saving on maintenance by doing necessary work in-house, too).
The toters help typically, yet Turnage told a story of a time he couldn't avoid using an outside service far from his Mississippi home base, resulting in a near $15K tow bill for a grand total of four miles moved. The job, the tow company claimed, required a rotator and a hefty "EPA clean-up fee." Turned out the tow operator didn't even own a rotator and certainly didn't use one for this particular job. Turnage found it out when he showed up in Pennsylvania with an appointment to pick his truck up, and the tow operator put him off and put him off for hours before finally relinquishing the equipment.
[Related: TFX, Oberman come out on top: Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champs, finalists in Nashville]
How'd he handle that one? I'll just say it turned out in Turnage's favor, despite all the rigamarole, thanks to state regs -- hear more about it in the podcast, along with a variety of other war stories from each of the individual owners.
Overdrive Radio's sponsor is Howes, longtime provider of fuel treatments like its Howes Diesel Defender all-weather mileage booster and winter Diesel Treat anti-gel treatments to get you through the coldest temps, the Howes Multipurpose penetrating oil, and other products.
Along the way, hear me introduce each owner from the stage, and plenty advice from the champs about preparing to make any big move from one truck to many. (There’s also an anecdote about a Pete 579 that gets misstated as a vintage, just-1-million-mile Pete 359 -- with plenty of surprise, laughter and obvious camaraderie amongst the owners assembled.)
A lot to glean from the long careers of these five, and here's big congrats to all, and a note of thanks for joining us and event sponsor NASTC in the effort. Take a listen:
[Related: FTC's 'junk fees' rule could protect trucking companies from predatory towing]
