"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