Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year contenders

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, January Trucker of the Month Ken Brodeur, owner-operator out of Escondido, California, tells the tale of his circuitous path to trucking over three decades of prior IT tech and music-industry careers. He leased and then purchased his first and current truck in 2016, a new Kenworth W9 that he’s kept in great working order ever since, with a diligent maintenance approach, some good luck, and plenty in the way of shrewd decision-making over tumultuous years for trucking, the economy in general and more.

The flatbedder’s experienced highs and lows through his now half-decade in business with authority, before that leased to Landstar, learning from successes and failures and putting them into practice.

In essence, as a fellow owner and friend said about him in Cole’s feature story, Brodeur’s just “one of them good old success stories” in trucking.

In some ways, Brodeur's is a story that repeats itself all around the nation for owner-operators who successfully manage revenue against costs for solid income. It's a tale of a man who “started with a big company and moved his way up, bought himself a truck, got himself a trailer and watched his Ps and Qs," his friend said. "Just a true owner-operator.” 

Meantime, Brodeur's made good on a long-term goal of greater control of his life, with full control of his business.

Read more about owner-operator Ken Brodeur in Matt Cole's feature attendant to his January honor: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15736267/trucker-of-the-month-throws-chains-tarps-after-decades-in-it

Nominate your own business or that of another deserving owner you admire for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

'Road less traveled': Trucker of the Month Ken Brodeur takes control with authority

The voice you'll hear at the top of this Overdrive Radio edition is that of Overdrive's February Trucker of the Month Kenny Wingate. Clearly, he knows of what he speaks when he invokes the feeling -- "nothing like it," he said -- that he associates with best of trucking as an owner-operator, running your own game when times are good. It's part of what drove him to take the leap back from company work he was doing to launch his Southpoint Exchange businss with one truck and his own authority in 2019. He’s up to two trucks today, headquartered in Auburndale, Florida: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15738560/how-truckings-supposed-to-be-done-meet-kenny-wingate

He's the proud owner of two sharp Peterbilt 579s and stainless reefers, and he's been focused throughout the company's relatively short six-year history on business brass tacks, building a team around him for freight with regular brokers, many of whom he’s known going back decades. Likewise on the accounting, bookkeeping and general business management side of Southpoint Exchange, and he's set up for further growth after a lifetime spent trucking, as you’ll hear in the podcast. 

He's 55 years young today and relishes that long history in the business, though many of the men he learned from, and some of those he came up with in trucking, have passed on. 

Magnanimous in manner, clearly on top of his game as a business owner, Wingate is also nothing if not grateful for all the help of those who came before him. He told the story of a recent encounter of an old friend at a dock. "Our generation is starting to be few and far between ... The other day I run across a gentleman I probably hadn't seen in 25 years, and we trucked together," Wingate said. "We sat down on an old wooden bench at the back of our trailers while we were getting loaded" remembering all those who came before but also "we just laughed, man, and just cut the fool, and it felt good. It felt good to see somebody that you trucked with years ago, you know, when when things were a little different."

At once, most of the folks the two men asked each other about were gone, he said, or at the very least off the road for good for health or other reasons. Wingate, 55, stays grateful for his own longevity, and looks ahead to the future and opportunities to build better business with Southpoint Exchange. 

In the podcast, hear that perspective but also just how two-truck Southpoint Exchange is getting the work done with dedicated freight on lanes between Florida and Northern Ohio. After being nominated by one of his customers, he’s officially in the running for our 2025 Trucker of the Year award, which you can enter yourself or nominate another owner via https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

Trucker of the Month Kenny Wingate leans into the pride, and brass tacks, of owner-op trucking

This week's edition of Overdrive Radio is another in our series highlighting contenders for 2025 Trucker of the Year, with Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole’s talk with Virginia-headquartered two-truck straight dump owner-operator business Dice Mayhem’s Trucking, headed up by owner-operator Hunter Hubbard and her husband, Tim. 

Hunter’s just about six years into truck ownership herself, her husband a good bit longer, yet clearly she’s harnessed a quality that current reigning Trucker of the Year Alan Kitzhaber sees in all successful people when it comes to business. As he put earlier this year in his “Plan for better business,” authored for our Overdrive Extra blog, “99.9% of success is desire.” That is, those who have a clear case of the want-tos, ultimately, probably will do whatever it is they set out to accomplish: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15712314

Cue Hunter Hubbard’s own advice for any aspiring truck owner when it comes to success in business for themselves. "If you have your mind set to do it, go for it. Nothing's stopping you but yourself, and the worst thing you can do is fail. But at the end of the day, nobody wants to fail. You're going to figure it out one way or another." Some days will be awful, but "you'll sit back a month down the road, two months down the road, and be like, 'that was rough, but hey we're still here.' You just gotta keep digging on it." 

As she well acknowledges, challenges will present themselves day-in, day-out, but those who keep digging will get through to the other side. Clearly, Hubbard herself has been one of those sorts these last years in business. "I might be a little stubborn sometimes," she said. 

She and Tim have built a steady base of customers for their two-truck straight dump business in and around their Virginia home base, weathering an array of their own customer challenges in recent years when a buyout of one of their main customers and integration of the two business left their own trucking company in an uncertain position for hauling work, given the company's small size.

Last year, she pivoted to a certain extent, with purchase of an older Peterbilt tractor, utilizing mechanical prowess with a new shop, too, to get it in working order and standing up a new, one-truck business for livestock hauling regionally: Dice Logistics. Yet dump work remains the Hubbards’ bread and butter, and the seasonality of both businesses continues to inspire the occasional second-guessing of their commitment to niche specialization. They could be hauling food, which always has to run, Hubbard notes, telling her story to Cole in this episode. They could be, that is, but "I didn't really choose that route. Everything's seasonal, everything depends on the weather," she said. "You just wait it out." 

They’re doing more than just waiting, that’s sure. 

As also mentioned in the podcast:   
**Matt Cole's two-part feature on ways to save on insurance at renewal: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15740305
**Learn how you can put your own or another owner-operator business in the running for the 2025 Trucker of the Year honor, with a chance to win a new seat from sponsor Bostrom Seating and Commercial Vehicle Group: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

'Keep digging' with Dice Mayhem's Trucking, growing dump roots to long-term small fleet success

"This year, if it goes like it has this past month, it'll be phenomenal." --George Kincaid

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, an audio window on our feature story about flatbed-pulling owner-operator George Kincaid’s one-truck business, written attendant to the Quinwood, West Virginia-headquartered Kincaid getting the April Trucker of the Month nod from Overdrive: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15743659/trucker-of-the-month-george-kincaid-and-the-power-of-positivity 

You can nominate your own trucking business -- or that of another deserving owner you admire -- via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker 

Kincaid’s deserving, for sure, with a sharp handle on maintenance with a decidedly do-it-yourself approach. What’s more, a whole lot can be said for doing something that you love, as he puts it, and a positive outlook on his life and work has been part and parcel of his success. Love of trucking has been with him since he was a kid when he and his younger brother both grew up with an eye toward exactly what they wanted to do when they were men. "It's pretty much what we always wanted to do growing up -- drive a truck," Kincaid said, and "have one with our own name on it." 

Dive into Kincaid’s story, but also that of another owner, John Rissler, whose Horse and Buggy Express trucking business out of California, Missouri, morphed into the Horse and Buggy Accessories chrome shop he operates now out of the Crossroads Shopping Plaza at U.S. 50 and Missouri 87, home of the annual Crossroads Truck Meet show: https://overdriveonline.com/15745021

We spent the day out at the Crossroads May 3 for this year’s show, and sat down with Rissler to hear its history, stretching back four years now to the time he and another brother, Delton Rissler, decided to build a new headquarters there. 

What’s it like to be the proprietor of a small fleet, a chrome shop with Missouri and Pennsylvania locations, and a truck show all at once? Well it never comes without a hitch, Rissler said. Soon as we sat down for the talk, his phone rang, as it would throughout our conversation. This call he had to take, though, from the man who was ferrying show attendees from the car parking area up to the show on a hay-ride-set-up flatbed trailer toted by an old farm tractor that had developed a pretty significant oil leak, as it turned out.

A hitch indeed, yet they would overcome. Hear more in the podcast. 

Flatbed owner-op George Kincaid looks out at prospects of 'phenomenal' year ahead

"If it continues like it's going, it'll probably be our best year. ... The way it started out and the way it's going so far, it'll be our best year."  --Flatbed owner-operator Ollie "Rufus" Morris reflecting on the year thus far

May Trucker of the Month Rufus Morris of Youngsville, North Carolina, was sounding a lot like April's honoree and fellow flatbed owner-op George Kincaid reflecting on the year thus far: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/15745657

Morris is leased today to Material Logisitcs Management out of Pennsylvania, operating from that home base in North Carolina, and was nominated for Overdrive’s 2025 Trucker of the Year award by his wife and business partner in the one-truck, two-flatbed-trailer outfit Midnight Rider Transport. We featured Morris late last month in Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole’s story about the decades of trucking experience behind Morris: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15747142/back-in-biz-owneroperator-rufus-morris-trucker-of-the-month

In this week's Overdrive Radio, hear Morris directly in conversation with Cole, walking through his current operation and long history -- this is his second stint as a trucking business owner, after hauling logs in the late 1990s into this century as an owner-operator. 

Morris hauls flatbed steel, a good bit of it oversize, in a 2004 model Peterbilt 379 he purchased several years back. It's in tiptop shape, shined up and outfitted with plenty in the way of bright parts and lights and just generally well-maintained, delivering all manner of benefits from the pocketbook on down to the scale houses. He takes pride in safety, clearly, the truck too.

"Get out there and stay consistent," he advised others on the safety front. "You just can't be in a hurry." Also: "Be proud of what you're doing. Keep maintenance up on your truck. I know they say, 'Chrome don't get you home,' but it does. Believe me." 

Most of the time crossing scales, Morris said, he's bypassed, the immaculate appearance of the rig he feels playing a big part in that. If your dog bites the inspector, though, all bets are off. (Catch an account of just such an incident in a recent-memory inspection in Matt Cole’s story about the Morrises.) 

Morris and Midnight Rider you can for sure call a little old-school in approach, in some ways, yet he keeps an eye on new ways and new people, too. In today’s episode of Overdrive Radio you’ll hear from him a clear priority placed on business relationships invested in, cemented over time, a key characteristic of so many a successful trucking business owner. Morris offered this word of encouragement for the next generation coming up behind him:

"A lot of people say, 'I wouldn't get into trucking for nothing in the world.' Don't get me wrong, it's dfiferent than it used to be. ... but I won't tell nobody don't get into it. If they want to do it? Trucking's done me good all these years. I can't complain one bit about it. If they've got a dream and want to do it, I'd say do it." 

Dive into Morris’s history trucking: an early business, long experience driving, and the reboot that was inspired in part by Patricia Morris herself after 25 years in real estate. 

Enter your own business or that of another owner-operator you admire (up to three trucks) for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award here: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

Relationship-value priority: Rufus Morris's old-school ways delivering new success trucking

Overdrive's June Trucker of the Month Scott Smith, owner-operator of Sapphire Cartage out of Searcy, Arkansas, has a couple of secret weapons when it comes to bookkeeping, tax accounting and business analysis. The first is his wife, Stephanie, who after time in the health care field and then with Scott rearing four young children, found new work Scott Smith describes in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio. Stephanie's built accounting expertise as support for a small-biz accounting software system, and her expert handling of the Sapphire Cartage back office has taken that load off of the independent.  

The second of those secret weapons regular readers encountered in the June 30 feature detailing Smith’s history trucking: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15749527/trucker-of-the-month-bets-on-equipment-diversity-as-failsafe 

Namely, it’s a custom spreadsheet the owner-operator built himself to effectively analyze per-ton rates in the hopper-bottom freight business when it comes to load offers. But not only that -- it's his go-to tool for week-to-week business performance as well. As was detailed in the story, Smith uses the spreadsheet to set revenues against not only hard costs like those for fuel but his weekly home needs, his own personal driver salary, if you will. What he needs to contribute to household take-home figures as an expense there, on a weekly basis. What he describes in the podcast brings to mind in some ways Overdrive’s own Load Profit Analyzer tool you can access at any time to game out rate scenarios or compare load offers: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer 

With that tool, using your own fixed cost per day, variable cost per mile and that self-pay salary figure per day to then compare as many loads as you like for profit potential, you too can set those driver-pay needs to be calculated on the expense side of the profit analysis.

For June Trucker of the Month Scott Smith, though, it’s his own system that accounts for all of it -- indeed a now not-so-secret weapon we'd wager many owners out there might do well to emulate in whatever form works best for the operation. In the podcast, hear more about Smith's operation and history trucking from the start, back in the early 2010s when like many out there he just happened into a love for the road via work in a different sector than the hopper- and flatbed-hauling work he does today.

Nominate your own or another business to contend, like Smith, for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker 

Read about all of our 2025 Truckers of the Month via https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

Secret weapons for bookkeeping, biz analysis: Trucker of the Month Scott Smith

This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast, another entry in our 2025 Trucker of the Year competition: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year 

You may have seen Matt Cole’s feature a couple weeks back now about longtime independent Ron Kelsey, who’s achieved something of an "owner-operator holy grail," as it were, trucking for decades now in a 1981 Peterbilt 359 and hauling direct freight for customers that date back three decades for the owner: https://overdriveonline.com/15751895 

Kelsey’s recent-history experience, too, stands as testament to the bedrock value of direct-freight relationships when the proverbial you-know-what hits the fan. With a "freight recession" ballyhooed by prognosticators time and again over the last three years, and spot rates down over the same period, Matt Cole asked Kelsey how he’d fared through tough times of these recent years.

"I really don't notice a change," Kelsey said, on the ground with his two principal customers. "I'm not No. 1 anymore" among independents hauling for them, given as he's progressed in his career he's not quite as consistently over-the-road as he was in past years. Yet general freight slowdowns he hasn't noticed. "I work when I want to work," and the loads are plentiful, always something availble, loading pipe outbound from the Phoenix and most often steel on the return. Invoiced, customers pay within days, too. 

"I'm very fortunate," he added, but there's more to his business prowess than just following the tides of fate, as you'll hear in the podcast. He’s well set-up to weather anything that comes, ultimately, and has come a long way himself from the young man who would end up inking a deal for his 1981 Pete after two-stepping with the owner way back in 1984. He’s hauled with it ever since, getting his authority 10 years later and building what the Kelsey's Trucking business remains to this day. 

Hear his story in his words in today's episode, starting like many an owner-operator in a straight truck in vocational operations before a trial by fire over the road in the late 1970s. 

Nominate your own or another deserving owner-operator business for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

Freight recession? Trucker of the Month Ron Kelsey just hasn't seen it with two direct customers

"I spend a lot of time making deliveries around here, so I have my little spots I know I can park." --Owner-operator Jason Shelly, speaking to knowledge borne of more than two decades' experience serving customers in Amish markets on the East Coast   

Those words were among the first owner-op Jason Shelly spoke when he talked to Overdrive Editor Todd Dills in early August attendant to reporting on his longtime one-truck business, Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Month for August: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15753418/trucker-of-the-month-jason-shellys-multistop-reeferhaul-niche 

He'd gotten parked up for the call mid-run on his regular route through the Washington, D.C., area, among the many routine destinations for his multistop reefer-haul business. It sets the scene, as it were, but also demonstrates the expertise he's built through consistency through the years, through specialization in that now 20-plus-year run loaded with fresh meat bound for those Amish markets. In this week's Overdrive Radio edition, sit in with Shelly as he tells the story of how he proved his invaluable nature to the customers starting with a partner serving a premium pork producer, then following through with consistent customer service as demand grew and grew and grew for the product over those decades.

Headquartered in Pennsylvania in the town of Telford today, owner-operator Shelly's legacy is certainly a work in progress. He's got plenty of working years ahead of him, but he's been nothing if not outgoing in his efforts to lend the benefit of expertise to those coming up behind him. As experience has shown, those relationships then grow to the point of mutual business benefit, too, as the Trucker of the Month feature about Shelly last week illustrated. Owner-operator Kris Bair, a decade and more Shelly's junior, calls him a mentor, no doubt, a sounding board for ideas and questions. Bair also bought his first truck, a restored 1980 A model Kenworth, from Shelly, with private financing worked out between the both men. 

For the very brief moment Shelly thought he was going to be potentially getting entirely out of trucking when he and his business partner sold to a larger operation, Bair then traded that W900A back to Shelly for his longtime runner, a 2000 W900 outfitted with a custom Double Eagle big bunk. 

Does Shelly still have that W900A in his stable today? Dills asked the owner-operator.   

"I upgraded and financed it for another" young trucker looking to get his start in business. "I'm not looking to get in the finance business" by any stretch, said Shelly, "but I figure everybody needs to get started, and I had some really good guys in my life that helped me get started." 

He's been able to be that helping hand up the ladder, so to speak, for the generations of owners behind him "several times over the years," he added. Hear his story, in his own words, in this Part 1 of our talk with Shelly on the podcast today. 

Shelly's Trucker of the Month nod for August puts him in the running for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award, sponsored for the year by Bostrom Seating, who’s putting a new seat on the line for the ultimate winner. You can enter your own or nominate another deserving business for the award at https://OverdriveOnline.com/toptrucker.  

A helping hand up the ladder: The mentorship legacy of Trucker of the Month Jason Shelly

"I want to honor my wife and her being the 'woman behind the man behind the wheel,' which is a high calling. Our first date ... was the day I bought that 1997 W9, so she didn't know what she was getting into." --August Trucker of the Month Jason Shelly 

Jason Shelly starts this Part 2 of a series of Overdrive Radio episodes featuring the owner-operator with a tribute to Renita Shelly, who's been Shelly's "biggest fan," as she once told him, since the very start of his business. The truck he invokes in the quote up top and in the podcast is the very first one he purchased, when he was a company driver for Horseless Carriage Carriers in the 1990s and thinking he'd be able to lease on with the car hauler. The fact that he didn't, though, as he told in Part 1, set him off on a journey to a long-term customer and a business that has benefited from all manner of family support, including Renita's, through the years. He's striven to pay it forward in all sorts of ways, and does so here of a fashion with his emphasis on that support, key to many a truck owner-operator's success. 

His longtime owner-operator father, also pictured in the cover assemblage for this episode, is intimately involved in the accounting/bookkeeping and other aspects of Shelly's one-truck business, including recent work reburshing the 2017 53-foot Great Dane reefer trailer also pictured. 

But it's Renita he emphasizes most for all manner of sometimes intangible impacts that have nonetheless been a lynchpin of his long-term success. 

"It's not an easy life, schedule-wise, and just the ups and downs. And at a certain point, she knew I wasn't going to be home until she saw the whites in my eyes, because anything can happen between here and there," he said. And when it did, "she's just been so patient, so understanding."

Going into the "second half of my career," he said, he's making a conscious effort to be more accommodating, too, remedy for all those times that "something or other happens at home and I'm 400 or 700 miles down the road and headed the wrong direction," which the "woman behind the man behind the wheel" bears on her own. Shelly referenced the old trucking song there. (We had a podcast episode put together by Max Heine about that one back several years ago here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15065078 )

So for this episode, a tribute, but also plenty more in the way of Shelly's advice for the next generation of owner-operators trucking. Jason and Renita Shelly are certainly making it work for their family, and diversifying investments as time goes on that ought to set them up long-term financially. Not that Jason’s got a particular eye on retirement, which we’ll also hear more about in today’s episode. 

As he says, "I don't look to retire, exactly. I may slow down. But biblically, there's no verse that I've ever found in the Bible that says you retire at this age" or that age. Rather, "it says to finish strong." Read more about Shelly: https://overdriveonline.com/15753418 

As mentioned in the podcast, the playlist of all the episodes featuring of our Truckers of the Month for 2025, contenders for the Overdrive Trucker of the Year award: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/overdrives-2025-trucker-of-the

Read about all of them: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year  


Trucking success, with a family assist -- the woman behind owner-operator Jason Shelly

The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio