"These are very entrepreneurial people, and very smart. And at this level, it's a business." --Wex Fleet One's William Fitzgerald

Of the top of this Overdrive Radio episode, Fitzgerald, over the Wex company’s anti-crime efforts, made reference to just how organized the rings perpetrating a variety of scams all around the trucking industry have gotten. And the money involved -- money you want to keep, whether it’s a piece of freight transaction with a broker, money in your business accounts used to fraudulently buy fuel or steal freight, or one of the many other flavors of fraud you’ll hear touched on in this week's podcast.

At the annual National Association of Small Trucking Companies conference, a panel convened to offer perspectives on crime, aimed at answering the question of just what we mean when we talk about "freight fraud." Too often, leaders around the industry and regulatory bodies tend to lump all manner of crimes in that bucket. We saw it to an extent again with news last week about the Department of Transportation’s intent to utilize AI tools against it: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15814889

Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie's report there delved into ways experts believe automated systems could be used for recognition of bad actors, yet specifics in DOT Deputy Secretary Steven Brabury's talk were few and far between. (Keep tuned for follow-ups as Lockie keeps ears to the ground for federal responses to follow-up questions sent to DOT.)

For NASTC President David Owen, It was one woman’s work around an old but ever-evolving issue -- that of "reincarnated" or "chameleon" carriers gaining authority over and over and over to outrun safety-record issues -- that got him thinking more closely about how the association might help small carriers of all stripes with education about and mitigation of all manner of frauds. Owen brought writer and researcher Danielle Chaffin into NASTC as Senior Sales Engineer following work mapping out numerous authorized entities she could link to each other in the registration system, as others like Dale Prax have done. She could see fairly simple, she felt, patterns of misrepresentation bad actors utilize.

In enforcing the rules against such entities, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration seems to date reactive. A crash happens, FMCSA sees the employing carrier has reincarnated once or multiple times, and shuts them down. That seemed to be the case after the triple-fatal crash of Harjinder Singh. FMCSA shut down his employing carrier soon after that crash came to light: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15753590

If enforcement efforts could recognize a chameleon-type operation before such a disastrous event could even occur, though, would certainly be welcomed by most legit trucking companies. It's heartening to see DOT leaders at least paying lip service to putting systems in place to help. With the most high-profile crashes, for all the focus on CDL drivers behind the wheel, non-domiciled or not, all are employed somewhere. There's no shortage of analysis concluding many such employers are running around the normal hoops through which good carriers small, large and in between must jump to stay within the bounds of the rules to sustain real, legitimate business.

Chameleon-type operations represent but one of the myriad types of frauds perpetrated on legitimate truckers and the American public. Panelists run through a variety of schemes and ways to tackle them head-on:

Resources:

**Cargo theft prevention: https://overdriveonline.com/15769312

**Recognizing double brokers, vetting systems: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15707529

**Identity theft: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15708218

**Wex's William Fitzgerald's fuel-fraud talk: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15772651

**'Cyber hygiene' and social-engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615

Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio, Kevin Rutherford recalls his first time on a stage speaking to a roomful of owner-operators, back in 1999 at the Mid-America Trucking Show as part of Overdrive's Partners in Business seminar series at the time.

The first question he asked the room was for a show of hands among those who had ready access to a detailed accounting of their business performance, such a profit and loss statement or weekly/monthly load-by-load accounting of costs, revenues and profits. Essentially: Who here knows their numbers?

He asked the same question back in October to small fleet owners and owner-operators, near 30 years later, and results were similar. "About five to 10 percent of the room" raised their hands in 2025, just as in 1999, he noted. "I set a goal in 1999 ... that every time I asked that I wanted more hands to go up, and I have failed miserably. I haven't even moved the needle" on it.

Yet still, as he contends in this podcast excerpting parts of his talk at the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in October, "if I can give you one thing that's going to turn your business around, it's that you have to have those numbers," he said. "It's more and more important all the time."

Rutherford at NASTC took attendees through what’s been his principal goal for more than two decades now -- helping one-truck businesses optimize every single aspect of their work toward the profit goal. As noted, he’s failed to capture the full attention of most owners, yet there’s evidence among those he’s reached his message is resonating, and it's working for many.

In the midst of the last few years' storm of difficulties for trucking businesses of all sizes, it's easy to find news of this or that trucking company’s recent bankruptcy, of course. Yet "while we're watching carriers drop like flies, I'm watching carriers I've worked with for years set records," he said. In this "crazy freight recession everybody's talking about, I'm seeing single-truck owner-operators put out records, revenue and profit records, that I've never seen before, that I didn't think would be possible."

Achieving such isn’t something that’s accomplished overnight, and certainly isn’t what you would describe as "easy." Yet Rutherford hopes more owner-operators might resolve this new year to take one area of focus – and he talks about plenty in what follows here – and take that area and really resolve to improve execution. Start with one, then move to the next one, and the next one. For the business owner with one truck, when it comes to controlling costs and really beating the competition, Rutherford feels the competitive advantage is real.

"Single best model in the industry -- a single-truck owner-operator with really good relationships with good small brokers," he said, "serving customers better than anybody else can."

Along the way through his talk, he delivers three points of emphasis for owners who using load boards -- they shouldn't be 100% satisfying freight needs, but rather serving as a strong educational window on the market, and a path to those strong broker relationships on specialized lanes that might carry independents forward toward being that truly Remarkable One Truck Company, or ROTC for short. That's the name he and NASTC have given their partnership to help deliver business insight and education to both Rutherford's network and NASTC members.

Kevin Rutherford's network: https://letstrucktribe.com

NASTC: https://nastc.com

Find Overdrive's own Partners in Business start-to-finish playbook for an owner-operator career, informed by both Rutherford and NASTC's work through the years, via https://overdriveonline.com/pib

Year 2025 is in the rear view, just back there behind the trailer. With any luck at all, owner-operators are making good time outrunning all that happened during what was some kind of a momentous year in and around trucking. As my colleague Alex Lockie put it in his year-in-review last week just ahead of New Year celebrations, 2025 may well go down as the year when the you-know-what truly "hit the fan" in trucking: https://overdriveonline.com/15774734

Among surprises, though, was real engagement from regulators in response to longtime asks of small trucking. That's even as owner-operators’ hopes for economic improvement at the beginning of 2025 with the second Trump administration went largely unrealized by the time the clock wound down on the year. Ongoing surveying of Overdrive readers shows a majority reporting income tracking along at levels either worse than or similar to those seen in the very-sluggish year 2024: https://overdriveonline.com/15774647

As of this writing, too, only just more than a third of readers are expecting 2026 to fare better on that score.

Yet as this week's podcast makes clear, there are at least some reasons to be optimistic. The episode springs into 2026 with a look back at the 10 most-listened-to podcasts of 2025, near all providing trucking-market touchpoints in stories that continue to evolve, with impacts slowly developing. From the federal push for a non-domiciled CDL purge and boosted English-language proficiency enforcement to freight-rates impacts with negotiation tactics and interest-rate cuts and owners' increasingly sophisticated attention to business brass tacks, all could prove positive for owner-operator demand and bedrock income day-to-day, week-to-week as time marches on.

Run back through the year with us in this week's episode, and find here a playlist featuring two honorable mentions for podcasts just outside the top 10, which start the playlist counting from No. 12 to the No. 1 most-listened-to episode of 2025. Happy New Year! Playlist link: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/countdown-to-kick-off-2026-the

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas last week, and looks ahead with hope for improved conditions for the new year. To get in right frame of mind, what better than to drop back into this special edition around Christmastime 2022, when we drop in on quite an experience for Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie out at the Danbury, Connecticut, stop on the Wreaths Across America convoy tour from Maine down to Arlington National Cemetery for the big central wreath-laying event. As with this year's Wreaths event, it was but one among thousands around the country at veterans’ cemeteries designed to pay respect to those who’ve served the nation.

Lockie there in 2022 met Hampton Roads Moving and Storage owner-operator Steven Meyer and his 1998 Freightliner FLD, pulling a custom wrapped Kentucky trailer of his own design and dedicated to honoring distinct individuals. Together, through Meyer's narration their histories chart a story of achievement, of sacrifice, and ultimately of elemental things about human nature.

For both men in the moment, the story delivers a measure of hope for the future of humanity.

Read Lockie's 2022 reporting from the event via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15304350/what-wreaths-across-america-means-to-trucking-and-all-of-us

Despite a record turnout in early December, trucker Noah Melton of small fleet Big P Express out of Southwest Michigan isn't 100% satisfied. Melton's one of the organizers of the Red Arrow Convoy, running 45 miles along the Red Arrow Highway near Lake Michigan every year for the past three, and growing in size and participation, that's certain. A grand total 89 trucks participated this year: https://www.facebook.com/groups/232190276570407

Yet "I want to break 100 trucks in the worst way," Melton told Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole in the conversation featured in this week's podcast to take you into the Christmas holiday.

The Red Arrow Convoy's origins trace back to a fellow driver's efforts at its start to make a cheerful display for members of the wider community in the region, and to have a little fun among like-minded truckers -- the parade features all manner of straight trucks, tractors and trailers (even freight in some instances) dolled up with Christmas lights and other decorations offering plenty spectacle to set the stage for Christmas festivities.

It's clear communities the trucks pass through along the highway have embraced the event, with many townships coordinating their official Christmas celebrations with it and "thousands of people from local communities" coming out just to see the parade, Melton said. "Some even have campfires next to the road."

Imagine it: "89 trucks all lit up with Christmas lights, horns blaring and jake brakes popping," Melton described the event. "You would see grown men and grown women jumping up and down like a kid in a candy store."

From the start of the event, though, a main goal has been simply to "give the drivers something fun to do before Christmas, as some of us are on the road" during the actual holiday, Melton added, yet it's "also to raise awareness to the community that truckers are just regular people like them."

With the podcast, hear Cole's talk with Noah Melton about his trucking history, most of it with Big P Express, and the story of how the regional group of truck drivers having a little fun around the Christmas season quickly came to be the big undertaking that is the Red Arrow Convoy today. With plenty future plans, too. Drivers interested in participating next year can join the drivers' private group for planning purposes here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/705730534890286

"Every day had an episode like that along the way. It was just the high, and the low." --XPO driver David May, reflecting on the roller coaster of emotion hauling in the Maine-to-Arlington Naitonal Cemetery run of Wreaths Across America

Off the top of the podcast, we dive right into the experience of military veteran and longtime professional driver David May, trucking out of the Buffalo, New York, area and speaking the range of emotion delivered by his 2024 participation in what is the annual effort of Wreaths Across America. That's the Maine-headquartered organization that for many years now has been built momentum across the nation, every December honoring fallen U.S. military members by laying wreaths on graves in ceremonies at military cemeteries. Trucking plays a big volunteer role in it, for certain, with wreath deliveries from Maine to points far afield, this year reaching nearly 5,600 sites, according to Wreaths Across America organizers: https://www.wreathsacrossamerica.org/Home/News/1495

The big day for the 2025 effort was this past Saturday, December 13, and for this Overdrive Radio podcast, we’re marking another big haul for participating truckers and trucking companies by revisiting David May’s experience as part of the 2024 convoy moving out from Maine toward Arlington National Cemetery for the big event held there annually. To give you an idea of the scale of that one, this year at Arlington, organizers noted, wreaths were placed on 265,000 individual headstones there through the work of 30,000 volunteers.

That haul alone is a massive undertaking, no doubt.

Honoring the memory of the fallen isn’t the only aim of the Wreaths organization. Here’s the goal in full: "Remember the fallen, Honor those who serve, and Teach the next generation the value of freedom."

Through our conversation with David May you'll hear quite a bit of all of that -- Remember, honor, teach -- yet also a window on just what his experience of the 2024 convoy toward Arlington was like. May’s hauled day-to day for XPO going back decades to when he was with Con-way Freight before the XPO buyout,. He’s a past America’s Road Team captain, where he first learned about Wreaths Across America in its early days. In 2024, he hauled wreaths in the convoy piloting the camouflage-wrapped “workforce heroes” truck of the road team, but it’s his individual experience, the veterans met and the fallen remembered, that most stand out.

That includes memorable time spent with a Vietnam veteran in-cab, and much more besides.

Just a few pieces of past coverage of the Maine-Arlington convoy, and other wreaths events around the country:

**2023 interview with Don Queeney, Director of Transportation for the organization: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15304674

**2022 convoy stop in Connecticut: https://overdriveonline.com/15304350

**2021 in the San Joacquin Valley, California: https://overdriveonline.com/https://www.overdriveonline.com/15286668

**2014: Trucker Vince Strupp recalls prior-years' participation in the convoy: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14887458

**2013 in Nashville, Tennessee: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14885399

As you'll hear off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio podcast, this “exit interviews” part 2 in our final run to conclude Overdrive's Trucker of the Year competition for 2025 features an all-flatbedders group. You’ll hear a bit of what some call "bygone" driver-to-driver camaraderie amongst the four owner-operators featured around -- what else -- the subject of tarping.

Arkansas-headquartered Scott Smith, owner-operator of Sapphire Cartage, described some new work hauling outbound to Atlanta with overlength freight. The rates are great with permits required, and lightweight, delivering fuel savings. Yet also: tarps required: "Putting on three tarps, putting three tarps' worth of bungees, taking off three tarps, folding up, putting up three tarps," he said. "Anybody got any sympathy?" Much laughter followed, of course.

Also in the podcast:

**West Virginia-headquartered independent George Kincaid: https://overdriveonline.com/15743659

**Longtime Kelsey’s Trucking owner-operator Ron Kelsey, who hauls in a beautiful 1981 Peterbilt 359 repowered in the 1990s with a C15 Cat and working with two principal direct customers upwards of three decades: https://overdriveonline.com/15751895

**And Rufus Morris, out of North Carolina, leased to Material Logstics Management and for whom it’s been an eventful year for his equipment: https://overdriveonline.com/15747142

Much like the story you heard from John Treadway last week, an eariler-than-expected in-frame reared its head with a cracked head for his 2004 Peterbilt 379. Then: more troubles rose in the following weeks and months. His advice to any aspiring owner-operator: Be ready for anything, at any moment.

Tough moments at roadside can be enough to make even a seasoned veteran like Morris question himself.

"I've had plenty times this year when I was like, 'Man, is it worth it?'" Morris said. But taking stock further, staring at that beautiful 2004 379, and despite all of its problems, "it's a good life," he added. "Yeah, it's worth it."

Just be prepared for anything.

With that something of a “final thought,” as it were, from Morris, the end is in the beginning for this edition of Overdrive Radio, full speed ahead to 2026 for these four Trucker of the Year contenders, this year’s competition sponsored by Bostrom Seating, who will deliver a new seat to the winner, ultimately.

Enter the Trucker of the Year competition at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker -- we're in the process of updating the form page there for 2026, but know that all entries received before the end of 2025 will be considered for the new year's program.

All of the Trucker of the Year 2025 profiles you can find at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

December’s here, and it’s time for the big push through to 2026 and opportunity a new year always brings a business owner to set goals, to lay plans and start acting on them. Yet as you’ll hear in this edition of Overdrive Radio, it’s also true that in so many ways the time for all of that is now, for any small trucking business owner, at any given moment. Like a football coach responding to what the opposing team throws at his own, a quarterback changing the play at the line, successful owner-operators are nothing if not masters of the art of getting prepped for the unforeseen. It's an impossible ask of anyone in some ways, but also a reality you’ll hear through today’s talk with four Overdrive Trucker of the Year contenders for this year’s title.

None less so than owner-operator John Treadway, our September Trucker of the Month. He delivered the shocking news of his pristine 1998 Peterbilt 379's October catastrophic engine failure. How might one prepare for that? Owner Treadway's long experience taught him, like others featured in this roundtable talk, the importance of the back-up plan, and not only could he afford what will ultimately be a reman Caterpillar crate engine powering the unit. The original Cat in the 1998 379 he's hopeful to rebuild with some close associates, furthermore, to in future repower his back-up power unit.

That backup, a 2006 379, with plenty miles on the odometer itself, is yet another element of Treadways effective prep for the October catastrophe. It's enable him to continue serving his primary and other customers as Caterpillar works through issues with the engine replacement.

His isn't the only update you'll get from owners in this podcast, where host and Overdrive Chief Editor Todd Dills put two principal questions to four owners:

1. How's business looking as we head into 2026, and have any goals set early in year 2025 been brought to fruition?

2. Reflecting on your own history trucking, what's the single best piece of advice you might deliver to new and/or aspiring owner-operators to help on the long road to success?

Featured, along with Indiana-headquartered Treadway:

**John Penn, our most-recent Trucker of the Month in October, hauling LTL furniture principally: https://overdriveonline.com/15770500

**Similarly LTL-focused fresh meat reefer hauler Jason Shelly, based in Pennsylvania: https://overdriveonline.com/15753418

**And two-truck dump fleet owner (with a third truck in more OTR work) Hunter Hubbard: https://overdriveonline.com/15741276

Overdrive's Trucker of the Year competition is sponsored for 2025 by Bostrom Seating -- there's a new seat on the line for the contenders. Consider this roundtable the "Exit interviews" with each ahead of announcements late this month of finalists, after the judging round. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more featured contenders.

Off the top of the Overdrive Radio podcast this week is the voice of fuel-payments provider Wex's Vice President of Global Anti-Financial Crimes William Fitzgerald, laying out a 1 in 12,000 transaction rate for detection of fraud over the company's entire fuel-payments network. That is, 1 in every 12,000 purchases are flagged as suspiscious, potentially fraudulent, and blocked in automated fashion among its millions upon millions of fuel transactions facilitated annually.

Translate that incidence to the roughly 350,000 fuel transactions National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen knows move through the association’s own Quality Plus fuel network any given month, and that’s right at 30 transactions being held up by the system. William Fitzgerald was speaking at NASTC's annual conference to outline the evolving landscape of fuel fraud/theft for attendees and showcase tools within Wex's (and some other card providers') networks that are increasingly successful in helping carriers of all shapes and sizes eliminate fraud's impact. Along the way, too, the company's been able to reduce the rate of so-called "false positives," legimate fuel purchases held up by the card provider's systems. Fitzgerald's well aware such hold-ups can be particularly annoying, and unproductive. Illustrating the huge financial impact of stolen fuel, though, he asked this hypothetical question to a room of NASTC conference attendees:

"What would be an acceptable false-positive rate in your minds?" he asked. "How many good transactions would you be OK with me stopping to prevent a bad one?"

The goal is zero false positves, of course, as Wex and other card providers calibrate a variety of techs operating in the network's background to get there, in addition to more human-focused efforts aimed at education to prevent account takeovers and the like that can bring the biggest hits to a fuel buyer’s bottom line. Results from ongoing efforts at Wex in particular have been good in recent months, he said. "We've got overall, over the last 10 months, a 25% reduction in losses, a 32% reduction in false positives," and a big increase in detection, too, he said.

Those results he attributed largely to technical innovations in company’s network, some described in part in a recent paper authored by the company you'll find at this link: https://www.wexinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/WEX-Closed-Loop-Fleet-Card-White-Paper.pdf

But the human element in fraud prevention might be the biggest factor any size carrier can address to make the most gains in preventing losses, empowering themselves through self-education and passing that on to team members for those of you with more than just a single truck under your management. "We've seen the most yield" in fraud prevention, he said, "with education and empowerment."

Fitzgerald described efforts of Wex to illustrate the kinds of schemes that might result in infiltration of its own backend, including simulated phishing attacks through targeted fake emails designed to get a user to provide access to their login data with a goal of compromising accounts. Wex sends such emails to its own employees on occasion to lure them in, thus serving an educational purpose in awareness. Their most "successful" such an effort? An offer of "free Taylor Swift tickets. Everybody clicked on that," Fitzgerald said.

In the podcast, track through Fitzgerald's entire NASTC talk, tracking through those backend upgrades but also plenty more you can do to work with the company's team and tools in its system, like its SecureFuel solution, to prevent fuel theft. Likewise, should the worst, to work with law enforcement to apprehend the thieves.

Mentioned in the podcast:

**'Personal cyber hygiene' in age of social engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615

**More from NASTC's conference on insurance, ELD data: https://overdriveonline.com/15770374

This week's Overdrive Radio edition puts a wrap up our series featuring 2025 Trucker of the Year contenders with the story of Orleans, Indiana-headquartered John Penn, his one-truck business operating with authority and hauling finished furniture on multistop runs West and/or South from his home base, other brokered freight back.

He’s the owner of another power unit, too, that he keeps as a spare, both rigs Freightliner Cascadias he details in the podcast and in this in-depth feature about his business, where he was named the October 2025 Trucker of the Month: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15770500/trucker-of-the-month-reaps-10mpgplus-rewards-learning-growing

Both Cascadias feature specs that help him achieve maximum fuel mileage -- upward of nine miles per gallon in the older unit (10-speed manual transmission) and more than 10 mpg in his current 2019 model, with the DT12 automated manual transmission.

We didn’t know it when he entered our Trucker of the Year competition, but he’s also the newest member of Freightliner’s Team Run Smart group of owner-operators sharing their own successes in various ways with their Freightliner equipment for the benefit of anyone interested. Team Run Smart hadn’t yet officially intro’d him as part of the crew there when we published the above story about him. Reps confirmed he was going to be a part of it for sure, but what they didn’t tell us was they’d post his official intro video to their Youtube networks that very same day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFyerQQX7lY

Find him now at his profile page on the Team Run Smart site: https://www.freightliner.com/team-run-smart/pros/john-penn/

I’d encourage you, too, to track back through all of our Truckers of the Month and Trucker of the Year contenders for 2025 at the main page for the competition: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year Plenty business best practice examples there, plenty to learn from in the stories of 10 exemplary owners this year. Keep an eye out there for the 2026 competition's entry page, where you can get in the running yourself in the coming weeks.

Though owner-operator Penn's modest about his success, it’s clear the owner’s doing quite a lot right with a very low operating ratio given his business’s efficiency, and with a home life that’s benefiting, too, as a result. Dive in with Penn from the very beginning, when he first got his CDL around the turn of the century, the start of a journey toward maximum trucking efficiency.