A round-up of Overdrive Radio's business-focused podcasts since 2013, including exclusive interviews, presentations and more geared to owner-operator and small fleet owner businesses among listeners.

Trucking business

"Hard to keep something nice if you're in the hopper world. There's dust, gravel, mud, farms, small driveways. ..." --Little Z Transport owner-operator Lucas Zach, Gilman, Wisconsin

Despite the difficulty, owner-operator Zach keeps his 2017 Peterbilt 389 and matching Timpte hopper pristine as can possibly be. He's put quite a lot of custom work into it with shop and fleet partners to cut a fine picture on those duty gravel roads in and out of farm operations, keeping his father's Tim Zach Trucking business's customer base rocking and rolling alongside his own operation. Catch a few views of the rig with Harlan Martin's 2023 389, too, via https://overdriveonline.com/15751123

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, Zach details the lengths to which he's gone in recent times to keep the 2017 out of the danger of those rock chips, dust and dirt with the story of a load of corn he picked up on a farm in South Dakota. Arriving for the load, the farm's owner urged him to follow the owner's pickup down a gravel and dirt road. 

"We just gotta go up the road about five miles," the farmer said. 

Zach continued the story: "He made it five miles up the road and I was only doing 10-15 mph, and he's long ahead of me doing 50 mph in his truck. ... He takes a right and goes another five miles to the east, then there's another five miles. ..." 

All told, Zach traversed 18 miles' worth of gravel to get to the load point, slow and slower, as it were. "He's anxious to get me loaded," he said, yet "here I am trying not to rock-chip everything all up." 

Hear much more from Zach about the truck and his operation in the podcast, along with a fellow owner-operator likewise keeping family truck-ownership traditions alive in Wisconsin. Little Brothers Transport owner Harlan Martin was just 22 years old when we spoke to both he and Lucas Zach at the Crossroads Truck Meet in Missouri in May: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15745021

Martin's the youngest of three co-owner brothers in Little Brothers Transport, with which owner-op Zach's business contracts on occasion to haul cattle, supplementing LB's 13 running units (with some owner-operators leased on) and about twice as many trailers of a variety of types to serve a diverse and growing customer base, long the province of many a successful small fleet. 

Speaking of successful small fleets, for the small fleet owners among you time is running out to enter to compete in Ovedrive’s 2025 Small Fleet Championship, open to companies of 3 to 30 trucks this year and sponsored again by the great folks at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies – for four finalist fleets there’s a trip to the late-October annual NASTC conference in Nashville on the line, likewise the Small Fleet Champ title belt in two categories. Get your entries in by July 31 via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/2025sfc 

Truck-ownership traditions staying alive: Owner-operators Lucas Zach, Harlan Martin

This week's Overdrive Radio podcast is a re-air for owner-operators and other truckers on the occasion of the 2025 Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Brake Safety Week inspection blitz. Get over to OverdriveOnline.com for an updated list of our Top 10 toughest states for brakes violations, to get a bit of a clue into where you might expect inspectors’ scrutiny of braking systems to be most intense this coming week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail/article/15753592/10-toughest-states-for-truck-brake-inspections-as-blitz-arrives

Brake Safety Week runs August 24-31, and along with reporting around brake-system inspections there for this episode we revisit a talk with Fleet Safety Services’ Jeff Davis delivered at the 2023 annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies. Davis offered time-honored ways fleets and owner-operators can avoid the inspection to start with. Even in an inspection-blitz week like this one, fundamentals still apply. And keeping on top of maintenance -- particularly with regard to lights -- is a big part of it, but there’s more to it than that. So we’ll just let the tape roll on the past episode this week. Keep in mind it was released ahead of the Spring 2024 Roadcheck event, initially. There are plenty references to that now-bygone inspection blitz event throughout, but nonetheless plenty to chew on from Davis. 

More brakes-related resources at OverdriveOnline.com/15753592

Even during blitz week, fundamentals count: How to avoid inspection without dodging scales

"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

This week on the podcast, the voices of two semi-finalists for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ award: 

First, Robbie and Levi Turnage of Mississippi-headquartered tanker fleet Turnage and Sons, LLC. They're respectively fourth- and fifth-generation milk haulers who've made good on a business with a stable of dairymen in the region specializing in organic milk over two decades of so Robbie's grown the fleet from just a single truck, following in the footsteps his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him -- the hands-on nature of each successive generation’s training and involvement in the shop, behind the wheel, and everything else that goes along with running a trucking business have no doubt contributed to the family business' longevity, with 19-year-old Levi now fully entrenched as well. 
 
In the podcast, you'll hear the Turnages in conversation with Overdrive's own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer in the cab of Levi's 2005 Peterbilt 379 "Big Red" parked up in March at the Mid-America Trucking Show. Marhoefer wrote about the pair in a story published in July you can read here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15751311/five-generations-trucking-the-turnage-familys-longevity-secret

Catch some pictures there of Big Red, too, which placed second in its class at the MATS show. Stay tuned for more reporting on the Small Fleet Champ contender in the coming weeks. 

Also in the podcast, fellow semi-finalist MRL Transport owner Mark Ledford, who founded and grew Red Baron Transportation to 35 trucks over 15 years starting in the early part of the decade before selling out and restarting with just one truck in 2019 as MRL. That story aired just last week at https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15753736/mark-ledfords-mrl-transport-master-class-in-trucking-rightsizing 

He’s up to five trucks now, with four drivers employed, and similarly gets his hands dirty behind the wheel himself, a fact key to both maintaining customer relationships spanning back decades now but also inking new business, as he tells in the podcast. Here, he takes even farther back to his origins in trucking working a dock in the 1980s, then his first OTR driving experience with a team operation. On his first run from North Carolina out to California his co-driver woke him up by turning the rig on its side in the middle of the night, memorably leaving Mark to climb out of a window and onto the cab's side, now upright, unable to find his glasses to sharpen the blurry lights all around him. Needless to say, as he notes in the podcast, he never would run team again. 

Meet all Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists and read more about them through this month via https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ 

Two Champs will be honored along with two fellow semi-finalists at Championship sponsor NASTC's annual conference October 23-25 in Nashville. More about NASTC: https://nastc.com

Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists not afraid to get their hands dirty in shop, behind the wheel

How might truckers get back a measure of flexibility in the hours of service rules, such as that enjoyed by so many owner-operators of past generations? That is, the ability to split the 10-hour required rest period into two periods of any length they want. That’s the option favored by a whopping 88% of readers who responded to Overdrive polling around the subject this time last year, with results published earlier in the year showing most readers wanted the ability just to split as they saw fit, fundamentally. 

Since the 14-hour duty window came into play more than two decades ago, well before the time of electronic logging device mandate's implementation in 2017, greater duty-window and/or rest period flexibility has been owner-operators' cardinal ask of regulators when it comes to the hours of service. 

After trucker appreciation week last week, we might see a path forward to it. In this Overdrive Radio edition, Chief Editor Todd Dills and Matt Cole break down the details of the DOT and FMCSA's announcement to start truck appreciation week last week of two proposed pilot programs to fully test two different options for split flexibility. 

It’s not often we start the annual appreciation week with something other than a free soda at a truck stop or other deal from a vendor or supplier to write about. Yet that was the case for Cole last week Monday, when DOT announced formal proposals to conduct those safety-efficacy studies. One's the split-as-you-see fit option of up to 5/5-hour sleeper splits, the other a daily up-to-three-hour pause button, spot to speak, for the 14-hour clock. 

The news wasn't entirely unexpected, nontheless. The formal proposals had been teased back in June as part of what the DOT called a “Pro Trucker” package of efforts. The formal proposals open up a comment period on how regulators might set up and conduct the programs, each of which will be open to more than 250 drivers to participate: https://www.overdriveonline.com/hours-of-service/article/15755537/what-fmcsas-hoursofservice-flexibility-pilot-programs-could-look-like

We’re certainly months out from interested participants being able to apply to take part, and given each test could take years to bring to fruition, it could be quite some time before any subsequent regulatory action is taken. That is, unless another federal body pushes the ball more quickly forward, as Cole puts it in the podcast, and "Congress were to get involved." 

Absent Congressional directive to take regulatory action, further hours flexibilities for all drivers aren’t likely in the cards before the next decade rolls around after these studies conclude -- depending on results, of course. That timeline takes us into whatever administration follows the current one.

"Personally I don't see this as necessarily a partisan issue," said Cole. "If a Democratic Administration were to come in" come 2029, he felt FMCSA wouldn't be likely to wholesale abandon work put into potential new flexibilities. After all, some of groundwork for the 2020 split-sleeper enhancements was put in under the Obama administration. 

If these two studies show positive or even neutral safety impacts for participating truckers, it might really get things moving toward change for the next administration's FMCSA.

Where to read and comment on the proposals, through mid-November: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/17/2025-17939/hours-of-service-of-drivers-pilot-program-to-allow-commercial-drivers-to-split-sleeper-berth-time

More on the 2020 split-sleeper change, which itself offered a boost in duty-pause and split flexibility: https://www.overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business/safety-compliance/video/15737159/significant-hos-change-fmcsas-2020-splitsleeper-provisions

Sleeper berth: Will truckers be able to split as they see fit? FMCSA opens potential path forward

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