"The set-up packet didn't even contain a contract. ... [and] would come back and would get thrown into a manila folder, thrown into a file and forgotten, and you were using the truck." --Roar Logistics Senior Manager Scott Filipetti on many brokers' carrier set-up processes in the days of yore

What brokers call "carrier onboarding” has certainly evolved mightily from the process Roar Logistics' Scott Filipetti describes off the top of this week's podcast. We’re talking the process by which brokers get a carrier set up within their systems to haul shipper customers’ freight, likewise ongoing monitoring of the basics of compliance with insurance and other requirements.

Gone are the days of the manila folder, for certain. Today, Roar's Filipetti notes, the company utilizes the Highway company's service to manage onboarding, vetting and ongoing monitoring of owner-operators and other carriers that work with the company, in addition to a set of standard operating procedures you’ll hear him describe in this Overdrive Radio edition.

Increasingly automated, detailed vetting by brokers all around trucking is aimed in part at backstopping liability, with new urgency given the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that killed off brokers’ old standard defense against negligence suits in state courts after an accident.

Filipetti knows the risk there -- unlike the prior broker featured after the SCOTUS ruling, Jennifer Mead of S2 International, Roar’s actually experienced a post-crash suit in Filipettt’s time there. Roughly six-seven years ago, he said, the company wasn’t successful getting it thrown out in total. Yet they did keep it out of a jury trial with a settlement, at least, which Filipetti attributes in part to the broker’s consistent approach to carriers, sticking to those SOPs, and documenting everything.

But also, fundamentally, the company takes an approach to carriers that places real value on relationships, still likely the biggest driver of the business it does with carriers today.

At the same time, as information available about carrier operations and safety performance has gone from the trickle of old to an absolute flood of potential sources over the last decades, Filipetti stands firm in the conviction that clearcut guidance for brokers and shippers is needed -- what they absolutely have to do in checking any carrier’s official credentials, and just what they don’t.

"It would be nice if the FMCSA had some type of standard that we and other brokers, and shippers, could follow," he said. He's in favor of the general approach of the Transportation Intermediaries Association is pushing for a "hiring standard," he added.

Clarity in such a standard might benefit carriers, too, whether through expanded opportunities or generally less invasive intrusions into their businesses by vetting services in the wake of the court's ruling. Much more on that front in the podcast.

Roar Logistics has been a Broker of the Year in the Naitonal Association of Small Trucking Companies’ Best Brokers program more than once in the last decade. That honor goes to a single broker every year during NASTC's annual conference, where Overdrive also honors four fleets as finalists in the Small Fleet Champ awards program each year. Time is running out to enter to compete in the program for those among you who are between 3 and 30 trucks. Get into the running at https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc by July 31. Hope to see you there.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Watch for our survey of owner-operators about broker vetting and more to publish this week: https://overdriveonline.com/business

**Roar Logistics' website: https://roarlogistics.com

Off the top of the podcast this week, a personal invite to all the small fleet owners in the audience to take this final month to get into the competition that is Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship. Time is ticking down fast to the July 31 deadline to compete to be one of four finalists who will net a trip with us to the annual conference of National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Nashville in October.

Every year, we end up telling the stories and sharing the business best practices exemplified by so many hardworking owners around the country, and we’d love the opportunity to share yours, particularly in light of this freight-market uptick we’ve seen this year so far after four truly difficult years all around trucking. Right on time, too, for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

For any independent among you whose made your own declaration, grown to at least three trucks, and exceled through the tough times, July 31 is the deadline to get into the running here: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc

This week and next, keep an eye out for features we’ll be resharing with check-ins with each finalist from the 2025 Championship -- including 3-10-truck category winner Wes Oberman, whom you heard here on Overdrive Radio several weeks back: https://overdriveonline.com/15825397 Likewise 11-30-truck champ TFX.

Find it all via https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ

Hope to see your company’s name in the running, no doubt.

Otherwise, the podcast is dominated by the voice of Overdrive contributor Mike Singleton, former second-career OTR truck driver and writer who’s clearly got a gift for story, for capturing the chance moment OTR, the relationships formed and lost, the disasters experienced: https://overdriveonline.com/15774442

You’ve probably seen some of Singleton’s short tales of OTR joy and hardship, finding humor even in the big mistakes made. Yeah, even the one you’ll hear about today, a bad angle taken to a parking spot that truly left a mark on his reefer trailer -- other marks, too.

"There are mistakes you make on the road and forget by the next fuel stop," Singleton narrates at the top, "Then there are the ones that get named. This one got named."

Here, we’ll walk through Singleton’s journey in trucking in fairly recent years after a decades-long career in information technology, and his route to a project he’s calling “The Blacktop Chronicles,” part of which is the series of short stories charting moments OTR that we’ve been publishing since late last Fall occasionally on the Ovedrive Extra blog: https://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra

Hear much more about it in Overdrive editor Todd Dills' talk with the Texan and former OTR driver, current writer and Richmond, Va., resident, Mike Singleton, today.

Sign up for Overdrive's newsletter *https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe* for your daily dose of trucking regulatory, business, and lifestyle news and views -- and more Overdrive Radio.

This week in Overdrive Radio, a sitdown talk with Tennessee Highway Patrol Lieutenant Christopher Brooks I recorded during the first day of Roadcheck in May. You may have heard parts of the conversation in the video two weeks back that centered on one of Roadcheck's primary focus areas in remote electronic-logging-device manipulation, chameleon carriers and all that’s happening at federal and state levels to target bad actors in that regard: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15827779

Or lack thereof. In our accounting with Overdrive’s RigDig sister company tracking enforcement trends in the violation data, as of today Tennessee’s still only issued a few violations for out-of-service ELD tampering, unlike other jurisdictions: https://overdriveonline.com/15826126

But as Brooks notes in the podcast, they’re least learning. With federal investigatory efforts in partnership, he’s hopeful the wide fraud problem can ultimately be eliminated to keep unfair competition from truly bad-actor chameleons out of the market.

More importantly for most of you, hear plenty from the Lieutenant about ways you might prep for the next blitz, the Operation Safe Driver Week traffic enforcement initiative happening July 12-18 nationwide.

Last week, we published rankings of state truck enforcement departments looking at moving violations issued as a percent of the total. Tennessee sits pretty high on that list, and that's no accident, according to Lt. Brooks. The state’s moved to prioritize traffic stops and Level 3 driver-credentials inspections increasingly over the years, certifying virtually the entire state highway patrol's road trooper force to Level 3.

The talk overall could be instructive with respect to getting ready for July roadside week. Brooks emphasizes ways to prep throughout for these kinds of expanded enforcement initiatives. At once, the week might not be quite what it used to be when it comes enforcement intensity overall, if CVSA-published numbers are any indication. Warnings/citations issued as a result of stepped-up efforts targeting both passenger-vehicle drivers and commercial truckers are way down from highs in 2020, as shown in the chart below in this post: https://overdriveonline.com/15828850

Just where those warnings and citation go, though, has clearly has shifted across jurisdictions back to the commercial-trucker side of the equation, since at least 2023. In places like Tennessee, where a large majority of troopers are certified to complete Level 3 inspections, expect credentials/hours checks to accompany most traffic stops during the week, yet full driver/truck inspections are always a possibility.

Brooks emphasized the importance of preparation for these kinds of all-hands-on-deck enforcement efforts, starting the talk with reference to the equipment focus of Roadcheck this year -- load securement. That’s a category where Tennessee’s truly something of outlier.

In our enforcement rankings for 2025, the state ranked No. 1 on the list of states with the highest percentage of overall load securement violations among states nationwide. For the moving violations in focus during Operation Safe Driver Week, Tennessee's at No. 11 nationwide.

You've got roughly two weeks left to prep.

"It really makes a world of difference. ... A little planning ahead of time" will help inspectors "get you back on the road, get the wheels back moving and reduce the time it takes to make that inspection."

As mentioned in the podcast:

**THP's Motor Carrier Plus specialized unit: https://www.tn.gov/safety/tnhp/cvemain.html

**Recent accounting of ELP OOS violations nationwide: https://overdriveonline.com/15828727

An extra-special edition of Overdrive Radio this week, handing the mic over to our own Long Haul Paul and, with the narration this week for the scene out at Large Cars & Guitars last month in Bristol, Tennessee, another of Overdrive's own in regular contributor Bobbi McGee. Her story will be live early Monday, June 22, 2026: https://overdriveonline.com/15828174

There at the truck show, three drivers were recognized together for quite an astounding achievement.

Hard to fully comprehend what it might take to lay down 7 million safe miles over the course of a trucking career. We're not sure anyone can fully wrap their heads around it, but the fact remains that these three have all done it, with more than 21 million miles between.

And at the now many-years-running Large Cars & Guitars show, Candy Bass, Eddie Parrish and Mike Brown came together all in one place to be honored for the accomplishment. LHP and McGee sat with the three to deliver today with two perspectives on what have been, and continue to be, genuinely amazing careers over-the-road. Hear LHP's take in the podcast, and catch the story in the post that houses the episode at the website for McGee's salute to them.

We can all echo McGee when she wrote, "Here’s hats-off to these three. It was a honor to be in their presence."

Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter -- https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe -- to stay up to date on the latest trucking business and regulattory news, custom rigs and more.

In this week's Overdrive Radio podcast, dig into Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole’s talk with Colorado headquartered 5S Express owner-operator Ron Schreiner, leased to Pejsa Family Transportation pulling the company’s tankers out of the oilfield on mostly short dedicated runs.

Schreiner’s got many decades of experience that started with a 1950s family business he got involved in growing up in the 1980s and, after his time in the Marine Corps, went hauling leased to in a W900A with a special family history itself. Cole first told Schreiner's story attendant to the owner getting the nod as May Trucker of the Month, putting Schreiner in the running for the 2026 Trucker of the Year award: https://overdriveonline.com/15826121

You can nominate an owner-operator you admire, or enter your own business, for consideration via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

Owner-operator Schreiner’s experience in his current business reboot, following his father's early-century passing, sees him following his own best piece of advice for all manner of aspiring or new-to-the-business owners. Namely, find the right used truck for the job you’ll doing. More about that in the podcast this week, and perhaps more importantly, he said, make sure your family fully supports you in your drive to success.

"You really have to have your family on board," he said. "It's important to have your family be able to back you ... to understand your time will be dedicated to that truck, to getting that business running."

Schreiner’s in gear in that regard, no doubt, with his wife, Kay, and three children helping make a challenging overnight oilfield schedule work efficiently as possible -- and he’s home most days in the afternoons.

He’s hauling in a 2007 Pete 379 in tip-top shape after a some recent front end repairs. As told in Cole's feature and in the podcast in his own words, Schreiner had an unfortunate wee-hours run-in with a cow on the way to load. Though the fleet he’s leased to was able to offer use of an idle truck to continue his daily runs, Schreiner was fast to move with his go-to maintenance partner on the repair. As he well knows, as is the case for any one-truck operation, "the grocery getter gets attention first," he said.

That's right, "grocery getter," his phrase for the 379 that powers the biz, and the family behind it. No, he's not pulling a reefer.

"She's the one that puts a roof over our head," he said of the truck, "and she comes first." 547c1b50-6809-11f1-a0eb-5be553a488df

In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, dig into issues of safety responsibility in the brokered-freight world after the Supreme Court’s May ruling removing a key defense many brokers have used in state courts to deflect civil lawsuits for “negligent hiring" after a crash.

The short of it for potential impacts: More brokers are certain to need to be able to readily defend their cases against suits on the merits. As ongoing Overdrive coverage of the reaction to the ruling has shown, it's an open question just how freight middlemen end up approaching demonstration of due diligence around carrier vetting: https://overdriveonline.com/15825631

The reality that lingers behind it is the safety rating responsibility law has long placed on the Secretary of Transportation and its Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. A relative few of the smallest carriers with authority have ever been rated. And rating outcomes trended negative for many years, as FMCSA placed emphasis on targeting resources toward problem carriers rather than the Satisfactory stamp of approval, as it were. The Trump administration's FMCSA in 2025 reversed that trend, in some ways, issuing a larger share of final Satisfactory ratings than in prior years, though overall finalized ratings fell off a cliff: https://overdriveonline.com/15826542

In the podcast today, hear a good example of a good broker in S2 International’s Jennifer Mead, honored last year by the National Association of Small Trucking Companies as 2025 Broker of the Year among its "Best Brokers" group of referred and creditworthy brokers.

Mead and S2 -- "knock on wood," she said -- have never been the target of a state civil post-crash suit, yet she well knows attorneys and others get "sue-happy" when a Supreme Court ruling like this settles a matter in question.

She fully expects more cases to be brought against brokers.

Yet she’s not fundamentally worried about S2’s position, with the company focused mostly in the expedited-freight world and with much of their book of business running on trucks and in vans of close partners carriers they really take the time to truly get to know.

"We’re ahead of that game already," Mead said of vetting carriers, "especially because we’ve been so time- and service-sensitive. You don’t want to put just any local yokel on the load and have a [factory production] line shut down."

Hyper-cautious, S2 has used vetting systems like Highway and FreightValidate for checks, though mostly for monitoring purposes rather than front-end vetting. Such systems help with a "good database for insurance," she said, and "getting the notifications of when insurance is expiring."

Too many brokers/shippers just "check the insurance once and don’t pay attention to it," she said. For carrier onboarding with S2, "I try to reach out and talk to owners of the companies that we’re working with" to get a real feel for them as business owners, for their attention to not only to service but safety.

"Vetting's a full-time job," Mead said, noting the back-and-forth with new carriers they're considering working with. While S2's set "thresholds" for things like age of a carrier's authority (six months) and other metrics, those don't necessarily mean "we just won't work with them," she added. Rather, judgment calls come into play after conversations, and consideration of the full range of data available.

That full-time job, she said, at once, could be more part-time, in her view, noting agreement with many around trucking that "we should be able to rely more heavily on the government for that." 

More safety rating from FMCSA could help. After the SCOTUS ruling, Mead felt "the water’s getting muddier" around vetting standards, not clearer. 547c1b50-6809-11f1-a0eb-5be553a488df

In this week's podcast, Truckstop.com founder and CEO Scott Moscrip tells the story of his return to an active management role in the company after the prior CEO's removal and company board's insistence he retake the wheel.

Since that happened, roughly a year ago now, "we started trimming at the top," he said. "About 80% of Truckstop's leadership was let go within about six months of me being back."

The business's shaky financial position was such that at his June 2025 return it was a live question of that whether the company would even be able to continue, as he put it. "It was that bad," he said, with bloat in the employee rolls up from roughly 400 when he first retired in 2019 to 2025, when Truckstop employed more than 1,000 people.

Regular readers will know Moscrip launched the load board as the first on the Internet back in the 1990s, when the most common question he got from a broker or trucker about it was "how do I connect to the Internet?"

Fast-forward to today, and the company still employs hundreds, and contracts outside support all the way across the world in places like India and the Phillippines. When Overdrive reported on that particular move in 2024, there’d been something of an uproar among sources inside the company about it, folks who worried about support levels declining.

Asked about the outsourcing, as you'll hear in the podcast, Moscrip confirmed those overseas teams remain in place, yet they've helped the core Truckstop.com team renews its focus on the fundamentals of the business -- serving the customers that use the board with functional improvements.

Oversears support efforts, he felt, had improved over time, too.

"They're up to speed now," he said. "We've also gotten better at outsourcing functions that really aren't necessairly industry-knowledge-based. ... You don't have to be an industry person to help somebody update their credit card."

With old "leadership out of the way," he added about the big shift this past year, the remaining more than 300 "employees are now leading the way."

The load board's business, he said, is back to being "about our customers, and what we can do to help them. ... We've allowed them to come back and fill our idea buckets," which resulted in a 30-for-30 push on the company's 30th anniversary this year.

That is: 30 new planned product enhancements for customers that's shaping up to be well more than 30. The company outlined all of the updates completed or planned as of mid-April in a document you'll find in the post that houses this podcast here: https://overdriveonline.com/15826494

In essence, Moscrip admits, the company strayed from what any business should be most closely focused on -- serving the customer. The loss of focus came a time that compounded the difficulty, as the “uberization of trucking” he questioned a decade ago came to fruition over the post-pandemic period. The negative ramifications were that entities flooded in looking at trucking like an easy-in-easy-out “gig economy,” he said , not playing by the same rules and regs established truckers and brokers did.

The fraud and rates turmoil that resulted, he added, are top of mind for the load board as it makes new moves toward better tools.

With this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, hear our talk with Black Sheep Express three-truck owner-operator and "problem-solver" Sam Kelly, headquartered in Mississippi and Overdrive's April Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running as a semi-finalist for our Trucker of the Year award for 2026: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15823428

If you or your small fleet, up to three trucks, excelled through the rough years since the big fuel run-up and rates shock of 2022, if you’ve persevered through all of that turmoil, and this year’s with war in Iran, you’re no doubt a worthy contender. Get your business in the running at https://OvedriveOnline.com/toptrucker

Here’s wishing everyone in the audience a Memorial Day honoring the fallen for the freedoms we enjoy here in the United States. For this week’s podcast, a different sort of honor for Kelly, leased now to CST Lines of Wisconsin in a refrigerated freight operation.

Kelly and his two drivers, Bubba Rushing and Rodriguez Byrd, pull a dedicated load outbound from Wisconsin to California, and in the self-dispatch program at CST there Kelly otherwise negotiates and books brokered freight on his own. Often, they're completing a triangle on the return with the Southeast and/or Washington State as the midpoint, depending on the season.

Kelly separates himself from the crowd in myriad ways, and perhaps not least in his willingness to be that problem-solver, to take matters into his own hands when plans break down. But Kelly’s story is remarkable in other ways, too, particularly with respect to a clear instinct to learn from his own errors in business and in life, adjust accordingly, and come out the other side no less eager to excel through hard times.

His drive toward business ownership in his early days trucking was such that he took a 40-some-cents-a-mile company driver job and basically lived in the truck to turn it all into a nest egg for a cash payment for his first power unit. It was a bit of a disaster, that truck, by his account, yet he persisted. When it came time to buy a house, too, he kept his long-term growth goals in focus. Frugality, in essence, would be his wachword

As in personal finance, as in business, too, for the owner-operator, who’s learned other lesson from those hard times, as you'll hear in this week's podcast.

Enter the Trucker of the Year competition: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

As mentioned, Overdrive Load Profit Analyzer: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer

Owner-operator and Overdrive 2025 Small Fleet Champ Wes Oberman's mostly-open-deck Oberman Logistics business makes good on growth goals with a transparent promise to owner-operators leasing there: 15% of the gross for costs, no insurance chargebacks.

Since his big win last fall in the 3-10-trucks division, the owner-operator's moved to 13 trucks, including his own 2026 Kenworth T680, by virtue of keeping that promise.

At insurance renewal early this year, even with growth, he was able to reduce his overall insurance outlay in an age where liability costs for motor carriers of all stripes just continue to roll up and up and up.

How he's done it: Acting on lessons learned from his National Association of Small Trucking Companies insurance agent about engagement with data the operation generate. We wrote about his experience in brief last Fall before the renewal -- https://overdriveonline.com/15770374 -- and in this week's edition of the podcast he details the result:

"We had companies fighting over our business this year. It was a nice turn," Oberman said.

His big win as Small Fleet Champ contributed, in ways small and much larger, where it matters.

"I have added that we are the Small Fleet Champs at the bottom of my email signature," he said, thus routinely flagging the recognition in any communication with a potential insurer. More importantly, the award was a "talking point when talking to all these insurance companies" in renewal negotiations.

But he knows it's the real engagement with safety data that he and his leased owners show, in addition to proven safety performance OTR, that's likely most moving the needle.

Details in the episode on an ELD provider switch that's helped, the tradeoff between "monitoring" and demonstrating active engagement, which means effectively more insurer comfort with his fleet's risk. That means itself lower costs, preservation of the transparency in his 15% pricing for owners leased long-term.

"That's my main pitch to owner-operators," that "our deductions are so low" for a reason, he said.

Enter your own business to compete in the 2026 Small Fleet Championship: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc

Bit of a public service announcement for the bulk of this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio. FMCSA Office of Registration director Ken Riddle emphasizes just what owners with motor carrier authority need to do by May 14 this week to prep for the agency’s long-awaited new registration system, called Motus.

Maybe you'd also been wondering just what was so important about the May 14 deadline in the agency's most recent notification to the industry about it. On May 14, Riddle noted, at roughly 8 p.m. Eastern time, FMCSA’s current registration system will go dark.

Motor carriers and other registered entities need to do three things by that time to ensure that getting set up to manage the company’s profile in Motus is, with any luck, a smooth one this coming week.

**Log into your FMCSA Portal account to confirm it is active. If your account is disabled or archived, reach out to the FMCSA Contact Center to have the account unlocked.

**In the Portal, ensure your company information, operation classification, contact information, and individuals authorized to access your record are all correct, with special emphasis on ensuring hte correct primary company official who will need to claim the account in the new Motus system.

**Make any updates to your company information in the FMCSA Portal the same way you complete a Biennial Update. Select “Biennial Update (MCS-150)” in the “Registration” tab.

Details from the most recent notice: https://overdriveonline.com/15823610

Next week Motus will launch likely Tuesday the 19th, and every entity that uses it for MCS-150 updates and all manner of other changes, as noted, will need to claim their Motus profile. Personal ID verfiication will be part of it, and though the old system will come back online, registration functionality will be gone.

Find more details about the rollout in the podcast, likewise the extent to which this transition itself will function to weed out a lot of the junk of inactive, long-dormant entities from the system, and how it could hold big import for combating all the impersonation that’s gone on with hackers taking over legitimate carriers’ authorities as well as "chameleon" entities using multiple DOTs to evade enforcement.

Folks all around trucking and among state enforcement officials join the the highest federal enforcement officer in the land, current FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, in hopes that Motus will ultimately correct current registration limitations in detection of potential bad actors from the moment they apply for authority and the color of legitimacy it brings.

Barrs called issues therein FMCSA’s “front door problem” as part of CBS 60 Minutes' reporting on Super Ego and the shape-shifting entities in its network.

FMCSA registration director Ken Riddle speaks to some of the ways Motus will evolve to help combat that, and of course what carriers need to do before the transition kicks off Thursday this week. Good news is this should be a major cleanup effort itself, he said, and he wants legitimate carriers to take the steps to make sure it’s as smooth as possible.

For those who don’t, there could be a lot of waiting for help on the other end of the transition.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Roadcheck's kicking off May 12 -- resources: https;//overdriveonline.com/15824079

**Enter Overdrive's 2026 Small Fleet Championship: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc

**FMCSA's registration office: https://fmcsa.dot.gov/registration and 800-532-8660.

**Ongoing coverage of chameleon fleets with Alex Lockie's most recent report: https://overdriveonline.com/15824551