"The goal of this program is to take one truck and figure out how to squeeze the maximum amount of profit out of that truck." --Kevin Rutherford on NASTC's ROTC joint effort with his business

Kevin Rutherford's Let's Truck and other initiatives are likely well-known to Overdrive readers. We last heard his voice here in Overdrive Radio from the conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies at the 2023 event. He made a case to small fleets and owner-operators in attendance for just how they might get through, even thrive in, the down freight markets then ongoing: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15658960

He was back at the NASTC event in Nashville in November last year with some news of a joint venture with the association, bringing his focus through many years helping owner-operators in business with coaching, and with tools like his ProfitGauges software and more ... news about how that singular focus would be coming to a NASTC work in progress, according to association president Dave Owen.

It goes by a nifty acronym, ROTC, or “Remarkable One Truck Company,” ROTC. (There's an alternate for that, too, Rutherford quipped during his and Owen's NASTC 2024 presentation: the "Rutherford Owen Training Curriculum.") It will be the end product of a closer relationship Rutherford and Owen have built over a couple years now. These two leaders in small trucking hope to be able to combine forces to help business owners with resources, tools and education.

"The number 1 reason for failure in small trucking is growth," said Owen. "And the number 2 reason for not succeeding, after you make the decision to get a second truck, is not growing."

It's a paradoxical reality the association sees many one-truck independents fall prety to when they move beyond the single unit, without the infrastructure in place to manage the biz when you’re no longer in complete control of the response to every single thing that can, and will, go wrong. NASTC exists to help provide that infrastructure, as Owen notes. These two men are hoping to fully launch the ROTC program as a training effort in some ways modeled on Rutherford’s long-running programs designed for one-truck owners to maximize efficiency and profitability. Those lessons then can be applied across any small fleet owner’s business as well, to enable better competition with peers -- the big boys, too.

As you’ll hear on the podcast today sharing some of their freewheeling conversation with a roomful of NASTC conference attendees in November, owner-operators and nimble small fleets do in fact bring a cost advantage to trucking over their big-fleet counterparts in numerous individual cases. Minus diver pay and benefits, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2024 cost analysis, it's costing the big fleets 1.30/mile. Meanwhile, one owner in attendance at the NASTC session with Rutherford and Owen noted his cost to operate, not considering his own compensation, was below a dollar a mile.

We made a comparison using Overdrive’s new Load Profit Analyzer calculator: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer

The profit result on a hypothetical four-day, 2000-mile run offered at $2.25 per mile for the rate rate was about 30 cents a mile in profit to the Remarkable One Truck of that owner-operator’s business, plus nearly $2,000 worth in salary to himself for the four-day run. The average fleet’s truck, on the other hand, loses a couple $20 bills’ worth of cash -- the only one profiting there is the driver, earning that nearly $2,000 in salary.

As mentioned in the podcast, Kevin Rutherford shared this form questionnaire designed to get you thinking about the areas where you want to improve when it comes to efficiency and business analysis, and signal your interest in the new NASTC ROTC curriculum: https://kevinonxm.wufoo.com/forms/welcome-to-the-rotc-breakout-session