"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

This week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features C.W. Express small fleet owner Steve Wilson, reigning Small Fleet Champ in the 11-30-truck division after a bit of a growth spurt for the fleet followed Wilson’s brush with death in 2022. The team he’d built around the dry van fleet sustained while he was in hospital for the better part of that entire year, and in the aftermath has only continued to not just sustain, but excel, on dedicated lanes for a central broker in Avenger Logistics. 

Wilson’s up to near 20 trucks and drivers today, and doesn’t have all his freight eggs in that single basket, as you’ll hear in today’s podcast, with customers in his area helping build lanes loaded both ways -- in one case out to Arkansas and back to the Louisville, Kentucky, area, where he’s headquartered in Sellersburg, Indiana. 

The podcast amounts to a tour around C.W. Express headquarters on Avco Boulevard in Sellersburg, right off I-65 and purchased and moved into in 2023, marking a significant upgrade to the former location. Wilson, a wear-all-the-hats small fleet owner for decades, continues to build out support for C.W.’s trucks and drivers with deft delegation, too, particularly on the time-consuming maintenance side of the business. He's added an expert lead mechanic you’ll hear hear who oversees the operation and a younger diesel tech, Clayton Higdon, to provide an assist and a well for education and growth, no doubt. 

Listen on for an update with reigning champ Wilson and C.W. Express.


Small Fleet Champ C.W. Express: Owner Steve Wilson, from new headquarters, assesses growing pains

"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

"If you're not going to do it right the first time, don't do it at all. That's what I tell everybody in here." --2024 Small Fleet Champ Paul Rissler

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, listen in for a tour around the headquarters of Paul Rissler Transportation, current Overdrive Small Fleet Champ, on the old home place for the big Rissler trucking family. Overdrive Editor Todd Dills was there in early May just ahead of Paul’s older brother John and younger brother Delton Rissler’s Crossroads Truck Meet show at the junction of U.S. 50 and Missouri state route 87 in California. Paul Rissler’s one of five Rissler brothers all with some tie to trucking -- in their family, it’s clear the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. In the podcast, Paul details his father and mother’s small fleet history right from the spot where it all started for a young Paul, following in his father’s footsteps as a small fleet owner.

The fleet’s ranged over more than a couple decades now from just a few to eight trucks. Paul and Michelle Rissler were right at 6 when they brought home the Small Fleet Champ title belt from the NASTC conference last fall. When we visited in May, things were in a brief moment of flux with one longtime driver moving toward retirement to local work, and another leaving as well. In search of the right drivers to fill those spots, the all-reefer fleet was well-positioned still with steady LTL lanes out of Pennsylvania from consolidator Dutchland Refrigerated, and other customers back toward Missouri from Colorado. Paul and his wife, Michelle (with all three sons Justin, Josh, and Jordan involved in various aspects of the business), have clearly built a fleet that's sustainable, no matter what comes. 

We start in the company office, then get a look at the main shop and warehouse area for Paul Rissler Transportation, then at the Risslerbilt, LLC, custom truck shop operated now by Josh and outfitted with what might just be the biggest paint booth in the entire state of Missouri. All of it was built by the hands of, and the close bonds between, the Rissler family and close-knit trucking community they’ve brought along with them on their long run of success. 

As mentioned in the podcast, small fleets of 3-30 trucks can enter to compete for this year's title belt in Overdrive's Small Fleet Champsionship via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/2025sfc -- deadline: July 31. 

Find more images from Rissler headquarters and the Risslerbilt custom shop in the post that houses this podcast at https://overdriveonline.com/15748560



Doing it right the first time: Paul Rissler Transportation, Small Fleet Champ for the long haul

Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio podcast is the voice of photojournalist James Year, commenting on an issue he feels holds potential to create alliances where few have existed in American culture and commentary. "In every market you can think there's a lot of disruptions starting to happen," Year said. "and it's one of those cases of strange bedfellows. ... Turns out truckers and actors and all the people that are generally fighting like hell with each other ... turns out they've got a lot in common on this topic." 

Namely, he’s talking about automation, the import technology holds for work opportunity in a variety of fields. In trucking, where that’s perhaps most salient -- certainly grabbing the most headlines -- is in the operating of the trucks themselves. The jumping-off point for the podcast is Year's recent short documentary video published via the More Perfect Union video channels. It came with an ominous title, and a video cover image clearly designed to raise a safety specter with respect to unmanned trucks on public roads: https://www.stealingfire.tech/more-perfect-union-documentary

The headline? "We chased driverless trucks in Texas. What we saw will scare you." There’s no scary crash in the video. There’s not even an unmanned, truly “driverless” truck in it. Rather Year, with a professional truck driver with him in a car, followed an Aurora Driver-outfitted truck that to start the trip actually had two operators in-cab late in April. Yet the pitch worked, clearly -- since release three weeks ago the approximately 15-minute video has been viewed nearly 2 million times, according to the Youtube counter. It all followed Year's long photojournalism project for his master’s work at Syracuse University. Year now teaches photography in Maryland.

Misleading safety marketing isn’t just the province of view-hungry video platforms. Look no farther than the messages of autonomous truck developers themselves, in some cases. On the Kodiak Robotics company’s website, for instance, the first text block you encounter purports to reveal the safety case for the "Why" behind just what the company is building with its automated driving system. It offers this statistic: “More than 85% of truck crashes in the U.S. were caused by human error.” 

Whose human error? As any trucker familiar with crash causation stats that exist well knows, the majority of that 85% weren't caused by the error of the professional truck operator. 

Year’s work is less preoccupied with automated vehicle safety than employment and work  prospects for the untold thousands of owner-operators and company drivers in the trucking industry today. The often disputed and debunked “driver shortage” narrative and how it plays into the sales pitch for automation is detailed, likewise the history of deregulation and the intense competition that resulted from the 1980s onward, all stories Overdrive readers will be largely familiar with. Year and his subjects assume autonomous tech companies will ultimately allow fleets to achieve real cost savings in safely removing the driver from the cab working on a large number of lanes. If so, what happens to all the individuals who might have otherwise done that work?

We’ve posed it before. Some of the tech companies we’ve interrogated about it no longer in fact exist, having imploded after investment cash dried up or they made a mistake of one kind or another and spooked whatever investors they did have. Still existing tech companies like Kodiak, like Aurora Innovations and Plus.ai, among others, tend all to stick to the notion that if you’re driving today, you’ll be able to retire as a truck driver. 

Yet given fleets' clear interest in helping develop these systems, for owner-operators the better question may be when will we have to compete with them at scale?

What's your take? Complete our survey via this link, where you'll find more reporting, too: https://overdriveonline.com/15749195

When should owner-operators expect competition from unmanned, truly driverless trucks?

Today in Overdrive Radio, walk through Kevin Bruns’ purchase of a 2019 Cummins-powered International LoneStar after several years of local dump truck ownership and work around quarries and construction sites in the Nashville, Tennessee, region. That followed early experience with authority hauling cars a couple decades back, based outside Chicago where Bruns is from originally, then pneumatic tanker work as a company driver, all of it in prep for where the owner-operator is today, married with two young children and back out on his own with authority as Bruns Trucking: https://overdriveonline.com/15749776

He restarted that authority a year and a half back, and with authority-age requirements so many brokers have today, up until recently he’s hauled power only with dry vans for several large outfits, now testing the waters with a step deck trailer fairly recently purchased, where he's seeing good rates with the trailer in service for just a couple of months.

The owner-op's making plenty time for outside pursuits, too. One of the reasons we came together last week was his then-impending competition in this past weekend's Semi Stampede uphill truck drag race competition at Kunle Motorsports Park due south of Cleveland: https://overdriveonline.com/15748980

Bruns attended with his big-truck-fan son last year, and this year was planning to compete in the stock class, bobtail. "I don't need to throw my driveshaft out," he quipped. Indeed, and you can find a video from his competition here: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DXAzYJ5qF/ (Unfortunately, the LoneStar got outrun in that one by a Pete, but I’m certain the experience was nonetheless one to remember.) 

Listen on for Bruns’ trucking career in miniature, and his efforts to build the network in and around Gallatin, Tennessee, these past years for maintenance, for freight and for life and music, too. It's Nashville, after all, where he's now headquartered. 

Find music from the Singin Trucker via Bruns social profiles: 
https://www.facebook.com/kevinbrunsmusic/
https://instagram.com/singin_trucker 

For daily trucking news, visit https://overdriveonline.com or sign up for the daily newsletter for email delivery via this form: https://randallreilly.dragonforms.com/loading.do?omedasite=ov_subscriptions

Car haul to pneumatic, dump to step deck and uphill drag racing, too: Owner-op Kevin Bruns

"Remember to shake a stranger's hand. You might accidentally make a new friend." --Bill Weaver

It's been a heavy week amid the Independence Day goings-on, trucking news and all the rest, but start this Overdrive Radio episode with a song with a whole lot of joy, sure to get the spirits up, as it’s writer, singer and performer -- the great Bill Weaver -- told the tale of its origins in the always-headed-home aspects of work OTR, since the moment he conceived it: “I’m Rollin’.”: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14889662

Yet it also brings a bit of a tear to the eye this week. Bill Weaver passed away Monday, June 30. For "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer, the news came by way of a mutual friend, Tony Justice, who shared his own recollections of Bill. Justice’s words I know ring out for so many who knew Weaver: “I can't even begin to find the words to express what he meant to me,” Justice said. “Best word would simply be friend, family kinda friend, my best friend. ... Hard telling the miles me and ol’ Bill covered while trucking and talking on the phone, a few hundred thousand easily, or how many times he made me laugh. He is irreplacable, and will leave an empty spot in my heart that will never be able to be filled again.”

And he finished this way: "Till we embrace again on the other side I’ll be jamming your music, brother. This aint good-bye, its a see you later.”

Weaver leaves behind his wife, CarolAnn, and so many friends and family members. Our hearts are with them all no doubt. In the podcast, celebrate with us some of what Bill Weaver leaves behind, with reairs of two podcasts featuring his "Every mile I drive" and "Burning the old school down" records, from 2016 and 2018 respectively.  

CarolAnn Weaver said she’s planning a memorial service for Bill likely for early August, and had Weaver’s International in the shop for service looking at a likely sale fairly soon. It wasn’t due for service, she said, yet it’d been sitting for a year. Questions about the rig CarolAnn referred to Taylor Barker, fellow trucker-songwriter and also a great friend to Weaver. The truck, CarolAnn said, was Weaver’s pride and joy. 

CarolAnn offered these words to mark his memory. 

“Bill was very special character who impacted everyone he met,” she said. “He never met a stranger and greeted everyone with open arms of compassion. I am so thankful and blessed that I had him in my life for 16 years and he helped me become a better and stronger person. He helped me find my way back to God, and to me that is priceless. I want to say thank you to all his fans that supported his love of music and appreciated his honest, heart-written words he shared through songwriting. He had a brilliant mind, so smart yet humble. I kid with everyone that he was my encyclopedia.”

CarolAnn went on to reference something Tony Justice also noted in his recollection of Weaver. It’s true that he said it near every time we ever spoke to him in person, most often delivered right before you were ready to part ways: “Remember to shake a stranger’s hand. You might accidentally make a new friend.” 

Bill, thank you for being one to us, that's certain.

Long Haul Paul's tribute to Weaver: https://overdriveonline.com/15750036

'Shake a stranger's hand' today: Remembering trucker-songwriter Bill Weaver

"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 edition of Overdrive Radio takes a deeper dive into Overdrive's relatively new Load Profit Analyzer tool: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer

Go there and pull up the analyzer to follow along with this detailed walk-through with owner-operator business coach and longtime Overdrive contributor Gary Buchs. As regular readers will likely recall from when it was introduced late in 2024, the Analyzer was in part inspired by Buchs’ own efforts at individual load profit analysis, tracing back to his decades as owner-operator himself. (Gary retired from the road in 2019, yet continues private efforts as a mentor/business coach to other owner-operators.)  

I brought Gary on to talk us through a few divergent load examples in hopes that more owner-operators in the audience might benefit from what is in essence a fairly simple calculator, but might also be a powerful personal accountability tool for business performance long-term. 

So, with this episode, get to a spot where you can pull out the mobile device or laptop and go to https://OverdriveOnline.com/load-analyzer 

We'll run through the three cost-input fields you see there, namely: 
**Fixed cost per day under load
**Salary per day under load
and **Variable cost per mile

Then analyze results for three different loads all originating in Dallas with offers at wildly different rates: $2.30, $3, and a whopping $10/mile on a short haul. When it comes to profits, though, results from the analyzer might be surprising if you closely take into consideration the impacts of time spent on each load. Set up with all those different cost metrics, considering your contribution to your home budget's needs in the salary on the expense side of the equation, fundamentally the analyzer is set up to help you do that with a close eye on business profits. 

There are always dozens of variables at play in load selection and post-delivery analysis, but engaging with your own numbers with the tool we hope helps yield better profit results over time, as Gary likes to say, as you "touch those numbers" routinely. Give it a whirl with today's podcast. 

More from Gary on the topic of negotiations in this past Overdrive Radio edition: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15736582

Three loads -- $2.30, $3, $10/mile: Which haul would you choose? Profit analysis might surprise you

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

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

New tracks tagged #owner-operators