Owner-operator John Penn trucks with authority as J.P. Transport, headquartered in Orleans, Indiana. The owner-operator's been in business for more than a decade now, with steady improvement in performance over that time on both the cost and revenue sides of the profit equation. Particularly the former.
With a Detroit DD15-powered 2019 Freightliner Cascadia today, Penn's pushing the limits of fuel mileage in a furniture-haul operation outbound from Indiana to parts West and South, multi-stop, sometimes complicated maneuvering at shipper and receiver. In early October, Penn's roughly 170K miles put on the unit was at an average of 10.45 miles per gallon in the 6x4, pushing power through a direct-drive automated manual DT12 transmission and 2.41 rear ends.
It's an upgrade over his prior main hauler, a 6x2 2014 Cascadia he still keeps as spare power and with which he achieved 9-plus mpg when running it full-time with a 10-speed manual. Before that: a turn-of-the-century Kenworth T600 he wrung 7.86 mpg out of, and the fully mechanical 1994 International 9400 that started his business.
Owner-operator John Penn
An inauspicious beginning for Penn, who looking back says it all felt a little like he "jumped out of an airplane and built a parachute on the way down," he said. "I’ve had a lot of luck, but it seems to have worked out somehow."
Yet he was preparing along the way, as his story makes clear, and has learned a lot in the years since.
Even with that first International, he was doing all he could to keep costs lean as possible. Working in the barn, he flexed his own mechanical abilities to get as much out of it as he could.
Put another way: "I sunk a bunch of money into it" before putting it on the road, he said, as noted starting in 2014. Fuel mileage out of the International? Even then, as you'll see in his story, he recognized the huge bottom-line impact of fuel efficiency in the profit calculation.
"I got 7 mpg" out of the B-model Caterpillar engine (a traditional 6x4 with 3.91 rears) in the International, he said. It's shown here pulling the step deck he bought early on from an owner he met chatting on the CB headed north toward home in Kentucky early in his career as an owner-operator.
"Less experienced drivers could learn a lot from him -- he really puts a lot of thought into what he’s doing," said Jeanna "Bean" Nelson about the owner. Nelson's the principal Rankin & Sons broker Penn works through for his steady outbound LTL furniture work. Nelson hears the griping from others she works with about the stops, the scheduling, the delays at receivers outbound from the office-furniture manufacturer. "I don’t hear anything from John until he’s empty. He makes things happen out there. I have a lot of respect for him. I think if we had 10 more guys like him, we’d be better off."
When it comes to making an owner-operator business work, Nelson added, "there’s not a better example out there than John Penn."
John Penn is Overdrive's final Trucker of the Month for 2025, putting him in the running for Trucker of the Year award.
Owner-operators, if you've entered, or nominated another owner into, the competition in recent weeks, Overdrive will consider the entry for the 2026 competition as we put things together for the next round. Meantime, use the entry form at this page on a continuing basis for nominations. On the line for 2025 contenders are a seat from program sponsor Bostrom Seating, and a scale-model replica of the winning owner's tractor as trophy.
[Related: In a tough trucking-business environment, owner-operators must improve efficiency to compete]
Easing into truck ownership with prep
John Penn first got a CDL in 2001, when he more commonly did construction work in his area in Indiana. "A local company here hauled propane, gasoline and hot oil for the asphalt plants," he said. Living in a small town like Orleans, word gets around. Someone told the company he'd gotten his CDL, and the owner got in touch.
"I worked for him on a Saturday -- started out with hazmat," he said, "nice because it was right here in my hometown."
He stitched together some days doing short-haul propane part-time, essentially, to finish up early enough to be able to get be back on the construction jobsite in the morning.
Two other local companies got wind of his CDL, too, and trucking for Penn continued in the same vein, part-time, for his first "seven years in the industry," he said. "I was a part-time driver. I'd run weekend loads for people. And at one time I was working for three different people here in my hometown." Run a trailer here, another there. "I'd haul a load of McDonald's meat down to Louisville in the morning and then go pull a load of gasoline in the afternoon."
The recession in 2008 hit, and construction work dried up. It "got so slow in November" that year he "went full-time trucking, and just never went back," he said. He was pulling a reefer, some local, some over-the-road. In June of 2009 Air Liquide, a French-owned company known for its Airgas branding in the U.S., hired Penn to do tank work moving carbon dioxide with a day cab.
It was a fit for the following years, with a terminal in his area, yet Penn always had it in the back of his mind that he wanted his own truck and business. "I worked at night a lot when I worked for them," he said. "I always knew I wanted to own my own truck, but just didn’t know quite how."
He spent a lot of time rolling down the road listening the downloaded podcasts of the era, including those hosted by Kevin Rutherford, then an Overdrive contributor and also making a name for himself with his own Trucking Business & Beyond radio show. "I would download podcasts," Penn said. "How to buy your fuel right" with a focus on real cost (minus fuel tax) and other subjects covered by Rutherford and in Overdrive's Partners in Business playbook for owner-operator careers to this day.
[Related: Fuel taxes: Finding the cheapest fuel about more than just pump price]
Though Penn might chalk his success up to that parachute he stitched on his way toward the ground, even then he was "trying to learn every facet of the industry," he said. An experience the year just before he jumped to Air Liquide helped push him forward with a fire for business.
The tank outfit he worked mostly part-time for "had a fuel tank there at the yard" locally, he said, and so "we'd fuel the trucks up and we'd go up to Indianapolis and then to Statesboro, Georgia, and it was a dedicated round."
The fleet's owner "always had really nice Peterbilts," Penn said, "the kind of trucks that everybody would want to drive." Big, beautiful late-1990s, 300-inch-wheelbase rigs, Caterpillar-powered. "Everything you'd want."
And then he had one other one, a late-'90s Freightliner Classic XL -- no small slouch itself with a 270-inch wheelbase, yet powered by a Detroit motor and with a studio sleeper; all the Petes were mid-roofs.
[Related: Topping 10 mpg: Former Trucker of the Year blends driving strategy, equipment]
Penn's usual Pete was in the shop, and he found himself on that regular run in the Classic XL, "kind of like the ugly duckling of the group," he said. "Same deal" on the run, though: He fueled up at the yard and went to Indianapolis to load. Toward the Georgia destination, "on the way down I would always stop in Jackson, Georgia, at the same truck stop, you know," to top off with enough fuel to get him back to the yard. "And so I knew exactly how much fuel I'd been putting in the truck with the Peterbilt."
In the Freightliner on this particular day, though, the tally for the fill was a whopping 30 gallons less than his normal. At first, he thought it just couldn't be right, but once he was certain, "I started figuring that up," he said, and the difference was huge, seemingly just due to a "little bit better aerodynamics. That and a different engine. If you'd figured it up on 100,000 miles, it was like $12,000 difference in fuel if you ran that same route, one truck to another. And I could not wait to tell my boss that."
The boss, at about 10 trucks at the time, could be spending $120,000 less annually on fuel, Penn told him. He wasn't exactly impressed. "Nobody wants to drive Freightliners," Penn said he told him. "That's what really put the spark in me," thinking, "wow, this could be the difference between making it and not."
By 2015, just a year after buying that International, he was doing his profit and loss statements himself with Kevin Rutherford's accounting software, and got laser-focused on costs and maximizing revenue. Since 2021 -- "best year I ever had in trucking," Penn said -- he and his wife put a big goal of getting out of debt "before I was 40. I worked like crazy to make hay while the sun was shining," got business and personal debt way down, and the house paid for.
"When I went to buy the 2019 Cascadia, I just wrote a check for it," he said, delivering personal dividends in the years since. "I don’t work near as hard as I used to," with about 85K annual miles and the ability to shut down in some winter periods.
Next-level efficiency: Influence ripples out
Owner-operator Kevin O'Sullivan, today based in Arizona, has known John Penn some years now. His first contact with Penn, whom he considers both friend and colleague today, came through Penn's Youtube channel, where he routinely shares videos offering other truck owners the benefit of just what he's learned through the years.
That journey started for owner-operator Penn at least six years ago now. On the haul all day long with "10 hours at night to do nothing," Penn said, "I thought, 'I’ll just start a YouTube channel'" to occupy the time constructively, giving back to an amorphous other he knew would be out there in the position where he found himself some years back.
For someone uninitiated to truck ownership and hauling with authority, social and video media networks have become go-to sources for firsthand information, granular to specific jobs, for certain. Yet also a fount of negativity. As Penn puts it, "ownership being a money pit, 'it's not worth it, don't do it.' You know, 'You're better off being a company driver.'"
For some, that may be true, but Penn's videos have clearly reached their intended audience with more brass-tacks examples of what you can in fact do yourself. "If you look at them, on his trailers, the aerodynamics, he did all of that himself," said owner-operator O'Sullivan. "He's very resourceful and documents everything and shows you the numbers."
Penn's most recent video as of October 31, 2025, documents an overhead adjustment on his 2019 Cascadia.
Owner-operator Kevin O'Sullivan runs leased to Schneider National today, after immigrating to the U.S. from Ireland in 1994. He started driving trucks here as a company driver in 1998, based in New York City, with most of those early-piloted trucks "all classics," he said, big large-car "379s, W9s, big wide-open trucks."
He'd been in a W9 right before he bought his first truck, and the "best fuel mileage I could get with that was 6 mpg." He did better with that first purchase, a Kenworth T600, but under Penn's influence he's moved in recent years to a 2018 ex-Walmart Freightliner Cascadia, DD15-powered with a 10-speed manual transmission, spec'd similarly to Penn's otherwise. He's certainly improved prospects at a 9.2 or so average fuel mileage.
"To go back from more than 9 now to 5 or 6, that'd kill me" as a business, he said.
Owner-operator O'Sullivan's 2018 former "Wally World" Freightliner -- 2.47 for the rears, he noted, now with 710K miles on the odometer.
O'Sullivan learned about the NASTC fuel card from Penn -- "that thing is like a dollar off in a lot of places," he said -- and has even gone as far as considering leasing to Penn, given that LTL furniture work is fairly familiar to him. He once hauled fresh fish with multiple deliveries to France and Spain. "That work really keeps you honest."
Another thing he learned from John Penn he's now seeing play out in his own numbers: "Most people think maintenance [costs are] defined by hours or miles" run, he said, with the increased expense that comes with use of a piece of equipment. Yet the amount of fuel you use is as big or even a bigger contributor to expense, in his view. More fuel used per-mile, in essence, equates to a higher maintenance expense per-mile.
Looking at his own business's numbers, "my maintenance barely even registers," O'Sullivan said, compared to prior years with less fuel-efficient trucks.
[Related: Parasitic costs: 15 ways to eliminate and save, build value as an owner-operator]
Kevin Rutherford's validated this from the analysis of the performance tracking of Joel Morrow in his work pushing the fuel-mileage limits in a diesel recently. Speaking at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies' annual conference on October 24, Rutherford said that "everything you do to improve fuel economy also lowers maintenance costs," and that the "savings can be incredible." Fuel use is simple to measure, obviously, yet Morrow and his Alpha Drivers team's tracking of maintenance expense and fuel-economy improvements helped bring enough data to the equation to "show the maintenance savings."
Other benenfits extend from reducing the need for maintenance, of course. If maintenance is down, equipment uptime is increased, in owner-operator John Penn's case meaning no missed deliveries on those multistop runs to Texas and/or farther west with furniture for his central broker and customer.
John Penn (right) and family in Indiana also own 20 head of cattle. "It's plenty to take care of when you're a truck owner-operator," Penn said. "If it wasn't for my son," also pictured, "we couldn't do it."
For return trips, he'll schedule something with a trusted broker or two if he's needed, yet finds he'll often bank "better rates with some urgency on the loads" just hustling the boards with his DAT subscription.
[Related: Why pick a fight with the air? And: The spot market 3 o'clock hustle]
While he's out working hauling furniture, back home his dedicated broker's customer is loading his extra van trailer for when he returns for the next run.
One of Penn's two trailer features the nose cone trailer fairing, as pictured above at right.
Penn's influence amongst owners is sure to grow with recent moves to bring him into the Freightliner company's Team Run Smart effort to share real-world experiences of Freightliner owners. It's a very recent development, he said. The mission of that long-running program is quite akin to "why I started making the YouTube videos, just to try to share what I've learned and a lot of mechanical things. To try to show that kind of stuff, because that's what I like to learn on YouTube."
A Freightliner spokesperson confirmed the Team Run Smart addition the company noting it's "proud to announce that John will soon be announced" as yet another in the long line of Team Run Smart Pros. His "insights and expertise will be a tremendous asset to the Freightliner community," the company said.
Keep an eye out for the company's video intro of Penn in the coming weeks, the spokesperson added: Penn's "energy and enthusiasm are already making a positive impact, and we look forward to sharing more of his story."
Some years ago, the owner-operator was sitting at a dead stop during rush hour on I-80 just outside Chicago proper. He was pulling one his trailers, recognizable by the the J.P. Transport logo on the side but also "pretty aero'd out," he said. "Full skirting. Flow Below on the truck and trailer. The skirts cover up the landing gear. ... I've got a Trailer Tail." That nose cone, too.
"A red Cascadia pulls up next to me," Penn said. "He's wanting me to roll the window down. And I thought I had a flat tire or something, and and then I roll my window down. The guy said, 'Hey man,' he goes, 'I bought this truck because of you.'"
Penn had made a video about his trip to Nussbaum Transportation when he was considering buying one of their used trucks, noting given the fleet's long use of aerodynamic, fuel-efficient equipment, it was a good place to purchase. "They're well-spec'd trucks," Penn said.
He asked the fellow truck owner next to him, then, over the ambient noise of the idling traffic, "That's a Nussbaum truck, isn't it?"
So it was. "I thought, 'that really made my day.'"
Keep tuned for announcement of Overdrive's Trucker of the Year finalists in December. Meantime, nominate any exceptional owner-op to contend for the 2026 award via the form on the page at this link. Nominations made there, as noted above, will be considered for next year's competition. Hear 2025 contenders' stories via the playlist below.
[Related: 'Be the best': Lofty goals successfully executed define owner-operator John Treadway's career]
