In this Overdrive Radio, we catch up primarily with owner-operator Daryl Zimmerman of Belgrade, Minnesota, co-owner with his brother, Nelson (also featured in the podcast), of two-truck Zimmerman Ag. Daryl was looking out the windshield glass on a bright and sunny day running between Minneapolis-St. Paul and his area in Central Minnesota bound for a feed mill that has been a principal customer of his business for much of its nearly 10-year history.

Since launching as one man, one truck in 2015, Daryl's was joined by Nelson when he got his own truck and leased it to the business, starting in 2020. They’ve since fully joined forces, extending a family base that stretches back to Daryl and Nelson’s father’s time as an owner-operator in the late 1990s.

Zimmerman Ag is Overdrive’s Trucker of the Month for October, putting the brothers in the running for the 2024 Trucker of the Year award and marking the end of the run of our semi-finalists for this year. In the coming weeks, expert more from all of them as judges begin the evaluation process for our final 2024 Trucker of the Year winner.

Today, the Zimmermans take us on a tour through their history in business, its entirety for both men as owner-operators working in support of farmers and other ag-support businesses, by and large, around their home base in Minnesota: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15706944/strength-in-numbers-zimmerman-ags-daryl-and-nelson-zimmerman

Look for further coverage of all Trucker of the Year semi-finalists in the coming weeks and for announcement of three finalists in December. All have a chance to win a custom replica model of the truck of their choice plus a brand-new seat from Trucker of the Year sponsor Bostrom Seating. Big thanks to Commercial Vehicle Group and the fine folks at Bostrom Seating for continued support. To get in the running for next year’s program, get over to https://OverdriveOnline.com/toptrucker to start that process. Deadlines mentioned there have passed for the 2024 award, but note that any entries or nominations of deserving owners will be considered for the 2025 program.

"The driver shortage is dead, long live the driver shortage."

That’s sort of the message you might get digging into a recent truck driver compensation study and the "driver shortage" narrative’s longest proponent’s response to it. That compensation study was conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine at the request of FMCSA. FMCSA itself was tasked to commission the study by Congress in the 2021 Infrastrucutre Investment and Jobs Act, the early Biden-era highway infrastructure legislation. The report examined truck driver compensation and compensation methods and their impacts on retention and safety, and along the way called the American Trucking Associations’ and others’ long-posited notion of a driver shortage "spurious." Fundamental labor economics principles cast doubt on what the ATA has long held out as persistent shortages, as reported Friday by Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15706801/does-trucking-have-a-driver-shortage

ATA, though, dug in its heels in response, noting in Cole's reporting that the NAS study report's authors “fail to account for several important points and distinctions that are critical to understanding the market for professional truck drivers.”

Of course, plenty others around trucking, including Overdrive's own reporting back in early 2016, have cast doubts around persistent shortages similar to those in the National Academies' study. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association in particular has long-pointed to high turnover rates in truckload as a kind of bellwether statistic that belied any existence of a true "shortage."

Today on the podcast, Cole’s conversation about the conclusions with OOIDA President Todd Spencer, who reiterated the association’s long-held view about persistent driver shortages now underscored.

On the driver-retention front, Spencer felt putting real value on a driver’s time, furthermore, could well be the single biggest improvement truckload carriers could make to build a base of longer-tenured pros over-the-road where delay at shipper or receiver docks or via an on-highway emergency "certainly isn't predictable," he said. "You can't plan for it and again the common thread with detention time is that the prevailing rate for that is zero" dollars.

Our own Executive Editor Alex Lockie, too, joins the podcast to break down last week's Broker-Carrier Summit conference in Texas, where fraud prevention in brokered-freight markets was front and center. Also, too, plenty subjects that played directly to carriers in attendance, offering insights into opportunities that just don’t exist for brokers, as it were.

As Lockie quipped, "Carriers ... had this lab on how to land direct feright, which is essentially how to cut brokers out of your life. Of course, you could not have a panel on how brokers could cut out carriers."

More of Lockie's dry sense of humor here, likewise a highlight moment near the end of a fraud-prevention panel discussion with with Anchor Reliable Transport’s Brian Woodring.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko's thoughts on value in the BCS event: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15684505/sweetness-of-low-price-v-the-sour-of-bad-service

**Lockie's reporting on changes to Carrier411's FreightGuard system: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15705912/carrier411-makes-big-changes-to-its-freightguard-carrier-reports

**Email contact for the Truckstop load board's look into potentially building a broker-vetting service for carriers: [email protected]

The expert singing voice of Marine veteran and Nashville-headquartered singer-songwriter Sal Gonzalez warms up and brings to fruition a special celebration event held last week by Rush Truck Centers in Nashville, Tennessee, in this edition of Overdrive Radio. Rush was announcing the big winner of the quite expensive, final, only 2025 build of a Peterbilt 389. A 389X, to be exact, that Rush Truck Centers won the final 389 build slot for, with Pete retiring the model for good.

As Rush Enterprises CEO Rusty Rush explains in the podcast, the build slot was awarded after an auction among Pete dealers and was secured for 1.5 million dollars. Peterbilt and Rush donated those proceeds then to the well-known Wreaths Across America and Truckers Against Trafficking nonprofits, then held a sweepstakes delivering another half a million to the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) org: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15705889/last-of-the-389s-goes-to-oklahoma-small-fleet-shane-best-trucking

That’s where songwriter Gonzalez enters the picture.

In the podcast, hear Gonzalez’s harrowing, moving story of losing part of his left leg in Iraq, then returning home to pursue a songwriter’s dream only to fall into an addictive pattern and seek out the support of WWP. Likewise, get ready for a moving song, "Heroes," Gonzalez wrote as a result of his subsequent work with the nonprofit, inspired by fellow veterans and his own experience.

We’ll hear, too, from Rusty Rush, detailing the sweepstakes and its ultimate winners, Shane Best Trucking owners Jennifer and Shane Best, out of Pryor, Oklahoma. The win was fitting for the small fleet owners in more ways than one – the 379X will add to their fleet of 17 Peterbilts doing dump work around their region, yet don’t expect a lot of wear and tear on it. The Bests plan to keep the rig around for many years to come, working with Rush Truck Center hands in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to finish out the rig with back-end mods as a show unit. With any luck, work should conclude in time enough for September 2025 -- look for the Bests and the last of the 389s out at the Guilty by Association Truck Show in Joplin, Missouri, then.

Also in the podcast, a window on the presentation Rush, Peterbilt’s Jason Skoog, and reps from the Wounded Warrior Project, with Sal Gonzalez rounding things out with that moving, terrific song we're happy to be able to share with you.

More about Wounded Warrior Project: https://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/

Truckers Against Trafficking: https://overdriveonline.com/15680845

Wreaths Across America: https://overdriveonline.com/15304350

"He's such a hard worker. He's always helping his family to help get their own authority. He'll let them lease on for a while ... until they get on their feet and get their own authority. ... He's just a good person all around." --Messina Holguin, speaking to reasons she nominated her husband, owner-operator Rene Holguin, for Overdrive's Trucker of the Year award

Rene Holguin is well on his way toward cementing a legacy with his El Paso, Texas-headquartered R&M Transportation business, part of it caught up in what his wife and business partner, Messina, intimates in the quote above. R&M Transportation has also been a vehicle for various family members and friends to get their own businesses up and running toward their own names on their own doors, with authority, a dream Holguin himself made good on more than two decades ago: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15704492/thirdgen-ownerop-marshals-experience-to-thrive-in-business

Overdrive's September Trucker of the Month harnesses that significant pay-it-forward goal after getting into business with tutelage of a family member himself, though he freely admits mixing family with business isn't always the easiest thing to do. This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast we're diving into Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole’s conversation with Holguin about his history in trucking, which stretches back to about the turn the century.

You'll hear Messina's here, too. Though she works herself outside of trucking, she’s also intimately involved in back-office aspects of the business. They’ve learned a lot together through the decades in business, and Rene Holguin’s made big strides in DIY maintenance in recent times as expenses have mounted and rates have lagged to the truck he’s owned and kept in tip-top now for the entirety of his time with authority.

His biggest piece of advice for new and aspiring owner-operators is of a piece with those maintenance strides. "Be ready to work," he said, and work hard. Learn as much about your equipment as you can. "Be ready to get your hands dirty, to keep your truck out of the shop as much as you can."

He’s pulling a flatbed with the rig today, and it’s a looker for sure, as you can see in Cole’s feature about R&M Transportation, likewise the cover image for this week's podcast. Dive into September Trucker of the Month Rene Holguin's trucking origin story, which stretches all the way back to his childhood, in the podcast here.

Find all of our features about Truckers of the Month through this year at https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

Holguin's nod for September puts him in the running for the 2024 Trucker of the Year award, this year sponsored by Commercial Vehicle Group and Bostrom Seating.

"If you're doing the right things ... if you're looking at your numbers, figuring out your fixed cost per day, your variable cost per mile, and choosing the best loads for yourself, you're going to weather this winter just fine like you have the last two years. And then when freight turns around, you're going to be in really good shape." --ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted

When freight turns around. What every owner-operator out there's been waiting for for quite some time, and it's like as not to be a while yet, with East Coast ports reviving from their stall and market prognosticators predicting that we’ll continue “bouncing along the bottom” all the way through the first quarter of next year, to use the words of ATBS VP Hosted himself. Yet there is at least some confluence of opinion on a potential market turn, given what you all heard on the Overdrive Radio podcast just last week, which suggested much the same, Q2 2025: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15704598/when-will-freight-markets-turn-to-the-positive-for-truckers

Get through the election, through the winter period and typical sluggish Q1, and hopefully further interest rates cuts might deliver confidence for business investment and some freight improvement.

For this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, our Partners in Business coproducers in owner-operator business services firm ATBS were kind enough to share the full audio and slides from their September 18 owner-operator income, revenue, cost and market update: https://www.overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business/article/15684315/ownerops-see-mixed-income-bag-but-wait-for-kickstart-on-rates.

You can download a pdf of Mike Hosted’s full slides to follow along here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15704990

Know that over on our Youtube channel, too, there’s a video version of Hosted's full presentation, too: https://youtu.be/jbWFVqL5jtU

Topline results from ATBS analysis, with trend lines derived from real-world performance of their thousands of owner-operator clients? Other than the market commentary you heard at the top, owner-operator income has been on average just slightly down for the 12 months ending June of 2024, compared to prior 12 months. It's down as an average because dry van owner-ops were down somewhat significantly. Yet leased reefer haulers and flatbedders, and independents too, posted gains. There’s a lot more detail within all that in the full presentation here, and plenty of potential insights around maintenance spend, fuel costs and efficiency, and much more.

Benchmark your own business's performance against the average numbers, yet know enough to recognize every owner-operator business has its own revenue and income needs, relative to costs.

Overdrive Radio is sponsored by Howes. Find more information about their full line of fuel treatments via https://howesproducts.com

The Partners in Business program is sponsored by the Rush Truck Centers dealer network. Visit them via https://rushtrkctr.com/4bLxbR4

In this week's Overdrive Radio edition, Part 2 of our "How to build business for trucking’s down cycles" online roundtable in late August. Among the questions flagged for panelists was just whether, and when, the long freight-rates slide of the last two years might turn the corner, or at least stabilize. Since the late-August time period, the march toward the presidential election and a modicum of certainty on that front continues, of course, but perhaps more importantly the Federal Reserve has cut benchmark interest rates by a half point, the first such cut in after a two years' worth of several hikes meant to help tamp down rapid inflation: https://www.overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business/article/15684315/ownerops-see-mixed-income-bag-but-wait-for-kickstart-on-rates

Panelist and longtime Overdrive contributor Gary Buchs posted recently in his Truck Business Network group about expectations of further cuts when the fed meets again late in the year and early next year. Those cuts might spell not only good news for borrowing costs to, say, finance a truck purchase down the line, but also stimulate spending and moves in various sectors of the economy, generating freight.

In essence, Buchs noted, get ready for potentially improved conditions, but not for a good while yet.

Here’s how he put it:

“Every trucker is waiting for the market to turn around, as so-called experts keep predicting These interest rate cuts are historically some of the things that will make this happen. But the increased opportunity for better rates doesn’t happen overnight. Go into your phone and set an alarm for four to six months out from the date these interest rates make dramatic moves. Odds are that is about the time business will change, as it takes time for companies to have confidence to place more orders, then the companies manufacturing have the confidence to ramp up production, and the cards begin to fall and make things move.”

He went on to compare running an owner-operator business to an ultra-marathon, as it were. “The return on the investment of hundreds if not thousands of hours of intense commitment and training aimed at a goal is celebrated when, one day, we finally are able to cross that finish line,” he wrote.

Today on the podcast we hope to give you further opportunity to learn from Buchs and two other panelists who were part of our roundtable, namely Silver Creek Transportation Founder and President Jason Cowan (Overdrive’s Small Fleet Champ for year 2021) and ICV Express owner-operator Ilya Denisenko.

In the previous part of this two-part podcast, panelists ran through a variety of customer-management tactics aimed at preserving relationships, building new ones, and batting back those inevitable requests for a “discount” from even longtime customers.

In part 2, they field a variety of live audience questions, from those about timing of a recovery to special considerations for flatbedders when it comes to customers, what owner-operators can do to combat brokers’ ever-increasing insistence on roadside inspections on the record as a condition of doing business, just how to compete when shipper customers are being solicited at cut rates by brokers, and more.

"The sweetness of low price is really fast, even though the sour of bad service lasts a lot longer. The sweetness is really tempting to jump in and take." --Silver Creek Transportation founder and president Jason Cowan

At the top of this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, you'll hear the sage words of Silver Creek Transportation Founder and President Jason Cowan, excerpted above. The past Overdrive Small Fleet Champ was speaking to the difficulties of managing freight contracts with customers in a time like the present, two years after what’s been a big filp-flop in demand for carriers of all shapes and sizes. The demand and subsequent freights-rates fall has impacted large and small, from flatbeds and lowboys to tour haulers, dry van pullers and reefer toters, all around the nation.

Cowan was talking as part of Overdrive's roundtable on ways to build an owner-operator or small fleet business to weather inevitable down cycles: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15682400/location-location-how-to-find-that-extra-load-in-your-backyard

We hosted the event back in August, sponsored by Bestpass and Fleetworthy Solutions, since rebranded fully under the Fleetworthy name and including the Drivewyze weigh station bypass solution: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15683690/diesel-hits-lowest-national-average-since-fall-2021 (The combined company aims to be a one-stop shop for bypass, toll collections management and discounts, and fleet-management solutions.)

In this edition of the podcast, drop into the first portion of the roundtable that featured, in addition to Cowan, two other leading voices among owner-ops and seasoned veterans in Overdrive’s orbit (our own Gary Buchs, and ICV Express owner-operator Ilya Denisenko), all speaking to ways to set your trucking business up to stand out from the crowd, to beat that "sweetness of low price" when it inevitably comes to you from the customer’s mouth.

As mentioned in the podcast:

**Register to view the entire session here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15682393/catch-the-replay-how-to-build-business-for-truckings-down-cycles

**Alex Lockie's first report from the session on roads through the dark economic clouds for owner-operators, and how to find that extra load right in your own backyard: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15682400/location-location-how-to-find-that-extra-load-in-your-backyard

**Part 2 on salesmanship, effective communication and negotiation, more: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15682445/first-load-free-ownerops-get-creative-with-sales

When we polled owner-operators about a year ago on recent-history improvement, or lack thereof, in detention time along their routes and at their customers, a huge majority noted the situation they'd seen at docks hadn’t improved to any noticeable degree in recent years. Forty percent of all poll respondents at the time in fact said detention had gotten worse for them: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15544369/how-to-calculate-detention-rate-for-owneroperator-business

If the American Transportation Research Institute's new look at detention is correct, though, waits to load/unload are getting at least marginally better for the average driver out there, if not the majority of Overdrive’s largely independent owner-operator readers.

In this week's Overdrive Radio edition, track back through Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole's reporting on ATRI's "Cost and consequences of truck driver detention" study: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15683714/how-detention-time-impacted-trucking-companies-drivers-in-2023

The ATRI study's topline finding estimated trucking writ large lost $15 billion to detention at shippers and receivers in 2023. Yes, $15 billion with a B. If you consider the American Trucking Associations' annual revenue figure for the entirety of the trucking industry at nearly a trillion (ATA's 2023 estimate was $987 billion), that $15 billion is worth a full 1.5% of the entire revenues generated by trucking companies.

In the podcast, we break down the headline-grabbing numbers and how ATRI got to them with its 2023 detention-impacts estimate, likewise what owners and operators can do to put a dent in their own detention problems. Some of it’s obvious -- drop/hook situations, such as you can engineer them, will help -- but a lot is difficult, particularly the customer relations management that might truly make shippers and receivers feel the burden of their inefficiencies with detention fees charged.

And then actually collected.

As it stands today, trucking writ large tackles this issue by half measures, quite literally collecting invoiced detention fees only about half the time, ATRI found.

More on the detention subject:

**Recent OOIDA member survey: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15665203/ooida-member-surveys-on-detention-time-rates-deliver-ops-insight

**FMCSA plans new study, quandary for owner-ops working with brokers: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15638339/ownerops-weigh-in-on-fmcsas-detentiontime-study-efforts

In this week's Overdrive Radio podcast edition we’ll hear more of our talk with August Trucker of the Month Alan Kitzhaber, and a good bit about one particular subject near and dear to the 4-million-mile owner of a 1995 Kenworth T600 he's piloted since it was new.

"I've been very religious about investing my money instead of spending it, and it's put me in a position where I can feel comfortable retiring." --Oakridge Transport owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15681362/meticulous-maintenance-efficiency-trucker-of-the-month

Part 1 of this two-part podcast: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/podcast/15679534/4-million-miles-in-a-kw-t600-trucker-of-the-month-alan-kitzhaber

His long-term retirement investment strategy, suffice it to say, has owner-operator Kitzhaber well-positioned for an exit, making good on his view of his truck and the trucking business itself. As he notes in today's podcast, trucking's always been a vehicle, a tool to "get me somewhere else," he said. "I want to generate profit from it."

After squandering retirement savings from his work in the 1980s, mostly in his 20s, running a Radio Shack store, he's managed multiple qualified retirement accounts and other investments soundly. Nearing the end of a nearly 35-year run of consistently putting aside 15%-20% of his income, he’s nearly gotten to that "somewhere else," where he truly wants to go -- that’s retirement, setting out on a variety of projects, including building a house on his property in Eau Claire, Wisconsin; pursuit of photography and videography hobbies; taxidermy; and more.

As some of you heard in the podcast last week, Kitzhaber achieved a significant milestone in May this year -- he’s passed 4 million miles behind the wheel of a Cat-powered truck, his 1995 Oakridge Transport Kenworth T600, pulling since 2010 for a single shipper.

As is sometimes the case in the profiles we write of our Trucker of the Year contenders, that shipper, the Midwest home-improvement chain Menards, headquartered nearby to Kitzhaber in Eau Claire, was a little slow to get back to us fully. Yet respond the company did, with a bit of a tribute to their long-running partner in Kitzhaber you can hear in this week's edition, too.

**You can enter your own owner-operator business -- or that of another deserving owner -- in Overdrive's Trucker of the Year program, sponsored by Bostrom Seating, via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/TopTrucker

Entries to the 2024 program are open through September.

"Some guys customize their truck via paint, chrome, lights, and things like that. I customize my truck to make it a more comfortable place to be, a more profitable truck, a more efficient truck." --Owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber

It's another rewinder of sorts for this week in the Overdrive Radio podcast series. If you missed the news last week Tuesday, owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was honored as our August Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running for Overdrive’s Trucker of the Year award with his three-plus decades trucking and 4 million miles logged behind the wheel of his long-running 1995 Kenworth T600: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15681362/meticulous-maintenance-efficiency-trucker-of-the-month

Listeners have heard Kitzhaber in recent memory, of course, when he passed the 4-million-mile mark on the T600’s odometer in May we aired this talk originally in July: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15679534/4-million-miles-in-a-95-kw-t600-owneroperator-alan-kitzhaber

For those who missed the talk, this week hear Kitzhaber on his approach to keeping that rig running right these past decades and so many miles.

And: we’re at the final sprint for the Trucker of the Year award program for 2024. Nominations will close at the end of the month, and we’ve got just two semi-finalist slots left for a chance to win a brand-new seat, up to a $2,500 value, from Trucker of the Year award sponsor Bostrom Seating, a trip to and recognition at the Mid-America Trucking Show, various other prizes, and more. If you or another deserving owner want to put your business in the running, visit https://OverdriveOnline.com/toptrucker to do that.

Kitzhaber's not the first owner Overdrive Radio listeners have heard who's done similar -- "Mustang" Mike Crawford crossed 4 million in his 1994 Freightliner (12.7 Detroit-powered) back in 2022: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15291488/mike-mustang-crawfords-1994-freightliner-4-million-safe-miles

(Incidentally, Overdrive editor Todd Dills spoke with Crawford July 1 as he hitting the Prime yard in Springfield at the end of his final run before retirement with a grand total of 4,159,910 miles in the rear view of the Freightliner. More on Crawford’s final run in a future podcast.)

Owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber’s career stretches back to 1990, his time as owner-operator some years on with Millis Transfer, where he first took the reins of the then-brand-new 1995 Kenworth T600 as a company driver. He bought the truck from the company itself, then, a few years later.

Since then, he's been laser-focused on turning that truck into a profit-making machine, and meticulous with record-keeping in no small way. As suggested by the quote at the top, too, plenty modifications through the years have allowed him to excel to the point of achieving well more than 8 mpg for a fuel mileage average several years running this past decade.

There’s a lot to those modifications he’s made, for certain, detailed in today’s episode. And 4 million miles is a very long way. More than 8 times to the moon and back. At roughly 60 miles per hour it’d take you well past the hard end of the 14-hour clock to do it at 66,666 hours. We’ll track back through Kitzhaber’s history a little more quickly than that today on the podcast, along the way learning plenty about just how the owner-operator kept that Cat-powered T600 humming efficiently for so very long.

As mentioned in the podcast, Caterpillar's interview with Kitzhaber for its Million Mile Club when he crossed 3 million: https://www.cat.com/en_US/articles/cat-truck-engine-articles/million-miler-alan-kitzhaber.html

Gordon Alkire's closed greasing system: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14877182/csa-proofing-part-two-closed-greasing-system