Overdrive Radio

The Overdrive 2021 Owner-Operator of the Year, chosen among finalists in the program we partner with the Truckload Carriers Association to produce, is nothing if nothing multifaceted in his pursuits both inside and out of the cab of his 2016 Freightliner Coronado, the fifth tractor owned in his three-decade history behind the wheel.

In this special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, talk a long walk with owner-operator Bryan Smith through his trucking beginnings after operating heavy equipment in the Marine Corps, his solid net income performance these last two topsy-turvy years, his musical talents and martial arts instruction back at home in the Dubuque, Iowa, area, and so much more.

What emerges is clarity of just why he was chosen for the award. It's well-rounded men and women like him who drive the trucking business forward by example, with bedrock expertise, innovation and true commitment to those in their orbits.

Read more about Smith via this feature profile: https://www.overdriveonline.com/owner-operator-of-the-year/article/15287252/2021-owneroperator-of-the-year-bryan-smith

Serious question: How do you know when it's time to hang it up?

I'm Paul Marhoefer, and I'll be your host for today's special edition of Overdrive Radio. I'm 62 now, and I keep catching myself devising an exit strategy from the life of a full-time trucker. After all, there's $1,500/month in rocking-chair money just waiting for me downtown at the Social Security office. There have been phone conferences with our CPA, as well as just a little too much screen time gawking over Youtube videos with titles like "Retire Early / $800 a Month / Boquete, Panama."

Truth is, I never planned on getting this old this soon. Watching my own dad continue to work well into his 70s had me shooting for octogenarian-trucker status. But lately? Not so much. Two of my closest friends in this business died in recent months, and they weren't that much older than me. And there have been a couple significant medical setbacks of my own, one of which was life-threatening.

In the new dystopia of closed restrooms and eateries, the slow-burning angst and malaise of operating in the midst of a seemingly endless pandemic, grinding away all week at an OTR job, going home for a day and a half, and doing it all over again has, in truth, made Paul a very dull boy.

So once again, I shamelessly parlayed the platform lent to me by Overdrive to speak with someone I admire -- someone who may be able to point me in the right direction. This week's victim is bestselling author, playwright, humorist, radio show host, singer-songwriter, newspaper columnist, and intermittent pig farmer Michael Perry. If anyone could tell me how to possibly cut out a livelihood out on part-time trucking and potentially other income streams, it might just be him.

Raised in a family of farmers, loggers and truckers, Perry left a good-paying job in the medical field to chronicle the lives of working people as a freelance writer, becoming a latter-day Garrison Kiellor of sorts, hosting the nationally syndicated public radio program, "Tent Show Radio," which has featured acts in its tenure like Merle Haggard, Kathy Mattea and John Prine.

In many ways, Perry embodies the creative equivalent of a small farmer or independent trucker, working the gigs that work for him, shedding the ones that don't. Not bad for a g uy who got his start writing for a trucking publication. He's our guest on today's Overdrive Radio edition.

Catch more in my Faces of the Road series via https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4404196

Early on in this Overdrive Radio edition showcasing trucker-songwriter "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer's new "Corn Belt Cafe" long-player, the Overdrive Extra contributor describes standing at the register of a roadside diner somewhere in Illinois on Labor Day in the early 1980s. "Right in front of the counter there was a worn spot in the linoleum," Marhoefer said, and "standing in the blackness of that worn spot in the linoleum ... was one of those moments where you’re surprised by a sense of bliss."

It was as if Marhoefer "had entered the portal of some one-ness," he said, a sense of being a part of a living history, of a fashion. "That’s something you don’t talk about if you’re a straight-truck driver from Indiana," as Marhoefer was at the time, though the memory stuck with him through the years.

So many of those old roadside diners are gone, as is so much else, and you get the sense listening to "Corn Belt Cafe" that Marhoefer feels keenly the loss, a pervasive sense that permeates much of the record.

The disc was recorded almost entirely in live takes in-studio with a principal partner in Michael Ronstadt, on the cello. The pair were able to evoke an appropriately earthy feel throughout, and the record features contributions from songwriters other than Marhoefer, and a couple co-writes with trucking fellow travelers Ken “Shoestring” Waugh, who sadly passed away last year, and Alabama-based J.D. Haynes.

All in all, "Corn Belt Cafe" is something of a first for Marhoefer, in that the record and it’s 12 tracks have a cohesiveness that’s maybe less apparent on some of his prior efforts, a throwback to an era in which the album was the ultimate product for any musical act.

Take a run through several stand-out tracks, many informed by Marhoefer's long trucking past, in today's edition of Overdrive Radio.

Find an embed of the full album in the post that houses this podcast at https://www.overdriveonline.com/15286999

Happy New Year to all of you! For this final day of 2021, we've got a special edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast to count down to 2022 with a run back through our most-listened-to episodes of the year. That'd be a final 14 -- plus a 3-hour pause, say -- for a lucky 17 of our 2021 editions of the podcast.

We’re going to hear about the hours of service – particularly in the context of the COVID-19 emergency declaration and its hours waiver, now in place in some form for almost two years. We’ll hear about custom project rigs and restorations, about California’s AB 5 contractor law, now headed to the Supreme Court, about COVID and in-sourcing and cooking in-cab and on the road, as we count down the hours.

The year-in-review Overdrive Radio episode here works out to a reality-rules/sometimes-bites window on what truck owners were most concerned about over the course of the year.

We've grouped Nos. 1-17 of the most-listened episodes excerpted there in reverse order in a playlist you can access in the post that houses this podcast: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15286794

Alternately, run back through them all via Overdrive Radio's SoundCloud profile: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/2021-in-review-the-top

Here's a wish for safe and profitable trucking to you, for 2022. See you on the other side. ...

The night of Friday, December 10, was a stressful one for legions of Americans across the mid-South as tornado sirens blared, with everybody and their brother no doubt gathered around whatever mess they might have, or not have, in their basements.

Owner-operator Daniel Koors of Indiana was up late monitoring storms’ progress himself that night – as you’ll hear in today’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. Though the destruction to his South in Kentucky was readily apparent that night, the next morning owner-operator Koors felt motivated even further to help when daylight shone on just how devastating it was.

Koors got a call from a fellow operator based in Lexington, and, some calls later, was on his way there with a dry van in tow to collect relief supplies and cash to distribute wherever it was needed. The operation continued for a full week, ultimately, as Koors told it.

The friend who’d put out the call to Koors for potential use of the truck was Lexington-based James Toller, but he wasn’t the only one involved in their effort. Greg Anderson, owner of small fleet AK Trucking, helped out, as did another trucking associate, Patricia Smith, in addition to the legions of folks donating to the effort on-site and from afar, of course.

Two dry boxes’ worth of supplies were gathered in parking lots around Lexington and then distributed to Kentucky families, ultimately, in addition to around $12,000 donated in person and online. Supplies were pulled behind Koors’ 05 International. Today on the podcast, we’re going to hear much more about the individual relief effort, yet another testament to how, when the going gets tough in the face of disaster, the tough get trucking for their fellow man.

Tim DeWitt is no short-term-minded person, as he says in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, charting how the small fleet owner’s begun to make good on on long-term goals of improving the conditions under which his now more than 30 driver employees operate. And: to continue to achieve solid profitability. He's doing it with his authority as DeWitt Transportation, based in Southern Illinois, and without owning a single trailer.

In the podcast, lean more closely into DeWitt’s operation, detailed in part in Overdrive's recent three-part feature series covering the wild growth in power-only opportunities for owners with motor carrier authority. You can find that series in full at this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15286059/how-covid-fasttracked-poweronly-opportunity-growth-in-trucking

There are many reasons for opportunity growth in that operating segment, where a truck owner runs a carrier business with authority but doesn’t bring an owned trailer to the freight arrangement. Growth in demand for large carriers’ services and limitations on fleets' growth is one, as he's seen at his principal freight partner, the brokerage side of Prime Inc.'s business.

Hauling exclusively there, however, DeWitt’s own company’s growth has been explosive over the roughly two year’s he’s been an employer of anyone other than himself. With steady and rising contract-type rates in Prime’s system, he’s made hay of long-term focus in a very short period of time, going from one to more than 30 trucks and drivers, and climbing.

So how is it that he's been able to recruit all those drivers when so many of his large-carrier counterparts sound like they’re facing the greatest shortage in history when they talk about the men and women behind the wheel? There's a guaranteed-pay structure involved, but a lot more to it. Here more in the podcast.

DeWitt was among Overdrive’s 2021 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists back in the Fall: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15279711/how-to-approach-guaranteed-driver-pay-in-a-poweronly-system

From a songwriting session in early 2019 with Nashville-based John Allan Miller, Airgas company driver Guy Archer, based in Dayton, Ohio, determined to get back to Music City to continue work in songwriting later that same year. Yet a back injury derailed that plan, then COVID happened in 2020, and getting back into his truck after unloading one night Archer happened to hear an advertisement early in 2021 for the Overdrive-Red Eye Radio Trucker Talent Search.

As many regular listeners will know, Archer went on to win the competition, and early in November, he was back in Nashville at the Jay’s Place recording studio with producer-engineer Jay Vernali laying down five of his original tracks, all of which you can listen to via this playlist he was kind enough to share with us: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/2021-trucker-talent-search-winner-guy-archers-prize-recording-session

For this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we’ll take a tour through some of those results as well, likewise a long talk with Archer about his life in music, and trucking but of course.

He got his start in 1992 with J.B. Hunt and has done a little bit of everything, including driving massive articulated dump trucks off-highway, on up to his current work for Airgas. His wife, Linda, joined him on the trip the Nashville for the session, where Vernali brought in Tony Graci on percussion and, on guitar, a player with a little trucking-music lineage behind him. Guitarist Chris Leuzinger’s pretty famous for his long and exhaustive work with country music leading light Garth Brooks, but he also played on one of the most famous trucking songs of all time, “18 wheels & a dozen roses” by Kathy Mattea.

Results from the session are spectacular.

Catch Archer's winning Talent Search performance on video here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-talent-search/article/15114790/guy-archer-named-trucker-talent-search-winner

Small Fleet Champ Silver Creek Transportation’s leader Jason Cowan speaks earlier on in this edition of Overdrive Radio to what he sees as an essential challenge in the highly competitive trucking industry for small fleet owners looking to lead by example and balance that competition with a rising-tide-floats-all-boats kind of mentality.

Trucking companies can do more, he said, do embrace cooperation amongst their kind, where it makes sense, to get the job done without hampering future opportunities for all around trucking.

In a nutshell: "I'd rather have your friendship than have your freight," he said, though such a spirit of 'co-opetition' is of course more complicated than that. Cowan and his wife and business partner, Penny, were joined for this roundtable discussion around owner-op and small fleet issues by fellow Small Fleet Champ finalists Robert and Karen Hallahan of Hallahan Transport and Nick Hewitt of Professional Transportation Services, Inc. All spelled out examples -- resistance to rate undercutting, referrals to carriers better equipped to haul certain products than your own -- that can pay off long-term when it comes to customer management, and growing the business.

The roundtable discussion took places earlier in November at the annual meeting of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Nashville, Tennessee. It touched on a variety of trucking business best practices and challenges -- from the rise technological complication with ELDs and more to changes in the brokerage world all three of these finalists have spent efforts grappling with over the last decade and more.

As noted, direct customer relations is a substantial part of it -- among the biggest areas of education any one-truck owner-op is likely to benefit from before jumping into the game with a second truck. Key in the long-term future benefit is avoiding self-inflicted wounds all panelists identified.

Hear more in the podcast, and read about each of the finalists in profiles you can find at the following links.

Silver Creek Transportation: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15115043/diversification-silver-creek-transportations-growth-secret

Hallahan Transport: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280238/hallahan-transport-thriving-on-lessons-learned-from-the-past

PTSI: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280537/trucking-legacy-of-nick-hewitt-and-platform-hauler-ptsi

Hear the announcement of the Small Fleet Champ winner at the NASTC even via this podcast from earlier in November 2021: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15281144/lowhanging-fruit-to-avoid-fmcsa-clearinghouse-violations

Small Fleet Champ Silver Creek Transportation’s leader Jason Cowan speaks earlier on in this edition of Overdrive Radio to what he sees as an essential challenge in the highly competitive trucking industry for small fleet owners looking to lead by example and balance that competition with a rising-tide-floats-all-boats kind of mentality.

Trucking companies can do more, he said, do embrace cooperation amongst their kind, where it makes sense, to get the job done without hampering future opportunities for all around trucking.

In a nutshell: "I'd rather have your friendship than have your freight," he said, though such a spirit of 'co-opetition' is of course more complicated than that. Cowan and his wife and business partner, Penny, were joined for this roundtable discussion around owner-op and small fleet issues by fellow Small Fleet Champ finalists Robert and Karen Hallahan of Hallahan Transport and Nick Hewitt of Professional Transportation Services, Inc. All spelled out examples -- resistance to rate undercutting, referrals to carriers better equipped to haul certain products than your own -- that can pay off long-term when it comes to customer management, and growing the business.

The roundtable discussion took places earlier in November at the annual meeting of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Nashville, Tennessee. It touched on a variety of trucking business best practices and challenges -- from the rise technological complication with ELDs and more to changes in the brokerage world all three of these finalists have spent efforts grappling with over the last decade and more.

As noted, direct customer relations is a substantial part of it -- among the biggest areas of education any one-truck owner-op is likely to benefit from before jumping into the game with a second truck. Key in the long-term future benefit is avoiding self-inflicted wounds all panelists identified.

Hear more in the podcast, and read about each of the finalists in profiles you can find at the following links.

Silver Creek Transportation: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15115043/diversification-silver-creek-transportations-growth-secret

Hallahan Transport: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280238/hallahan-transport-thriving-on-lessons-learned-from-the-past

PTSI: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15280537/trucking-legacy-of-nick-hewitt-and-platform-hauler-ptsi

Hear the announcement of the Small Fleet Champ winner at the NASTC even via this podcast from earlier in November 2021: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15281144/lowhanging-fruit-to-avoid-fmcsa-clearinghouse-violations

In this edition of Overdrive Radio ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, we're taking time to engage with two independent car haulers – Indiana-based owner-operator David Bunting and Ellenwood, Georgia's Eric Turner, owner of small fleet Turner Transport, both of whom have mastered the niche in spite of current auto-market challenges. Those challenges were discussed in-depth with them and others in Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole's three-part deep dive into car hauling, which you can read via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15280473/automarket-turmoil-is-putting-squeeze-on-car-haulers

There are plenty other car-haul challenges in a normal time, too, including per-vehicle-moved rates that don't always fluctuate with fuel the way a truck owner might want them to. There's varying heights of trailers loaded on two levels with differing types of vehicles, presenting bridge-strike danger around different parts of the country.

Yet for the self-starting, self-reliant among owner-operators, there’s a reason so many are attracted to the hauling niche -- most car haulers report cumbersome loading processes but with a chief benefit in that you're reliant on yourself to do the work most often. Dock personnel do not hold you at their mercy, as it were.

Hear the stories of both men and how they got into the niche, and plenty more, in today's edition.

Also in today's podcast: A run through "Virginia Red," a new single written about a driver and his truck. The tune was penned by Overdrive's Music to Truck By streaming radio host Big Al Weekley and his wife, Sandy Shortridge, who sings the bluegrass ballad. Read more about it via https://www.overdriveonline.com/life/article/15280309/music-to-truck-by-back-in-overdrive-with-a-third-hour