Insights
Operating notes from the freight frontlines.
Methodology explainers, market advocacy, and observations from FreightMath carrier engagements. Every post is grounded in the same Activity-Based Costing math behind FreightMath, MapLedger, FreightMarks, Quality of Freight, and BidRight.
The Trucking Owner's Operating Philosophy: Decide What the Network Will Become
Trucking owners must treat capacity as capital, define the network they intend to build, and make every major freight tradeoff explicit and accountable.
What is the FreightMath Operating Ratio?
FreightMath OR (FMOR) is a network-aware operating ratio composed of four dimensions. Here's what each one means — and why a single OR number lies.
Per-Mile Costing Is Misleading for Carriers: Try Our More Accurate Alternative Instead
Segment Level Costing assigns each GL expense to the activity that caused it, producing traceable profitability by segment, load, lane, and customer.
The Network Playbook: Why Every Role in a Truckload Carrier Sees Profit Differently
An introduction to The Network Playbook — a 12-part series exploring how OTR truckload carriers can structure networks, interpret data, and translate insight into profit across every role in the organization.
An OTR Truckload Network Is a Moving Puzzle
An OTR network is a changing system of freight, drivers, assets, appointments, and markets that requires shared data, judgment, and continuous analysis.
How MapLedger Maps a Carrier GL in Four Weeks
Every carrier's chart of accounts looks different. The MapLedger Standard COA is the trust layer that makes them comparable — here's how the four-week onboarding actually works.
Floor, Target, Stretch: How BidRight Prices Every Lane
BidRight produces three numbers for every lane in every RFP — the walk-away floor, the OR-target rate, and the stretch where good freight belongs. Here's the math behind each line.
The Freight Market Is Finally Cleaning House, and Enforcement Is Holding the Broom
Enforcement-driven capacity removal may shape the next freight recovery as regulators target unsafe, fraudulent, and noncompliant carriers across North America.
The “Montana Loophole” Under Fire: What Vehicle Owners Need To Know
States are using data and new laws to challenge Montana LLC vehicle registrations and assess unpaid tax, registration fees, penalties, and interest.
Meet MapLedger: The GL Mapping Solution Built for Trucking Companies
MapLedger standardizes a carrier’s native GL and uses activity-based mapping and distribution to produce traceable divisional and load-level profitability.
Turn Dedicated Freight Into a Margin Strategy
FreightMath’s Dedicated Pricing calculator models true operating cost, breakeven, and target margin while producing a client-ready dedicated-freight proposal.
A Normalized Rate Is Not a Profitability Metric
Normalized rate per mile improves revenue comparison, but FreightMath OR is needed to measure cost, time exposure, network position, and true profitability.
Trucking for Fun Is No Fun: The Hidden Cost of Cultural Habits
Freight accepted from habit, driver preference, or utilization optics can dilute density and accumulate losses even when each exception seems reasonable.
Is Your Freight Network Under or Over Priced?
The Rate-Haul Ratio and Expected RPM Curve reveal whether a carrier’s price fits its haul length, peer position, market value, and operating-ratio needs.
Freight Network Density: A Key To Cracking the TL Profitability Code
FreightMath’s Network Density Index shows how concentrated, repeatable freight improves predictability, cost efficiency, asset velocity, and profitability.
Feeding the Dragon: Using Assets To Support an Uncertain Trucking Future
David Roush reflects on using family real estate to fund carrier acquisitions and why growth must be balanced against liquidity and generational protection.
Built, Broken, Rebuilt: A Trucker’s Story of Lessons and Resilience
David Roush traces three generations in trucking, the rise and bankruptcy of ROCOR, and the experience that later shaped KSMTA and FreightMath.
Shippers Still Hold the Cards: Carrier Survival Tactics
With shippers retaining pricing power, carriers must build dense networks, control broker freight, right-size capacity, and protect all-in rate economics.
Race to the Bottom: The New Fuel Surcharge Reality
Breakthrough Fuel Recovery separates fuel from RFPs, shifting MPG, deadhead, timing, data, and total-rate risk to carriers unless contracts provide protection.
Standardizing Maintenance Expenses: Enhancing Maintenance Benchmarking Through Standardized GL Data
Separating tractor, trailer, and maintenance overhead costs gives carriers clearer benchmarks and more reliable insight into fleet performance.
Driven To Adapt: A FreightMath Approach To Outlasting the Downturn
FreightMath helps carriers endure a downturn through network discipline, Tier 1 freight, broker control, cost centers, fleet sizing, and staff alignment.
Standardizing Non-Driver Compensation: Strengthening Internal Insights and Industry Benchmarking
Consistent classification of support-staff wages, benefits, and payroll taxes helps carriers compare staffing costs and improve financial decisions.
A FreightMath-Based Approach To Right-Sizing Your Fleet
A five-step FreightMath test uses revenue, variable cost, net contribution, fixed cost, and mileage to identify trucks that cannot cover overhead.
Standardizing Driver Compensation: Improving Carrier Cost Management and Benchmarking
Standardized driver wage, benefit, tax, and bonus categories give carriers clearer labor costs and make FreightMarks comparisons more meaningful.
FreightMath: Why Repeatable Freight Is the Bedrock of Truckload Profitability
Repeatable lanes, closed-loop planning, disciplined sales, and strategic idling help carriers build density and protect margin in volatile markets.
When Will the Great Freight Recession End? Strategies for Carriers To Survive the Storm
The Great Freight Recession was not over in early 2025, requiring carriers to preserve cash, right-size capacity, and control broker freight.
Establishing Cost Centers and Allocations for Greater Financial Clarity in Trucking
Segmenting fleet, contractor, brokerage, and shared costs—and allocating them consistently—creates clearer operating results and better benchmarks.
FreightMarks: A New Benchmarking Standard for the Trucking Industry
FreightMarks combines standardized general-ledger and operating data to give carriers more than 100 comparable financial and performance metrics.
The Minimum Margin Threshold Revisited: A Blueprint for Sustainable Trucking Profitability
A carrier-specific minimum margin threshold creates a price floor for spot and contract freight and supports the discipline to reject damaging loads.
Slow Decline or Rapid Collapse: Lessons Observed During the Great Freight Recession
Using Peter Attia's fast- and slow-death framework, the article distinguishes sudden carrier failures from long-term erosion and prevention.
Carriers: Elevate Your Support Teams With the Power of the 9-Box Performance Model
The 9-Box Model evaluates support employees by current performance and future potential, helping carriers develop talent and right-size strategically.
Preparing To Thrive: Building a Reverse RFP Model To Fill Your Freight Network Gaps
A reverse RFP starts with the carrier's network gaps, costs, and driver domiciles, then directs sales toward freight that improves balance and margin.
KSMTA Introduces Expanded FreightMath 2.0 Platform To Revolutionize Network Profitability
FreightMath 2.0 compares potential and actual network performance, calculates segment margins, tracks deterioration, and adds targeted profit tools.
Rethinking Long-Haul Profitability: New Challenges in OTR Trucking
Long-haul freight no longer assures stronger margin as higher variable costs, slower operations, and lower rates change the tradeoff between miles and price.
The Evolution of Truckload Pricing and Network Engineering
Truckload network engineering has evolved from balance, cost, and backhaul fundamentals toward dynamic procurement, analytics, and denser partnerships.
Recruiting Outside Your Network: Compounding Margin Erosion in a Challenging Market
Out-of-network driver domiciles add deadhead and broker dependence, turning thin carrier profit into losses unless recruiting follows network density.
Where’s My Freight?: The Cycle Continues
The 2019 shift of committed freight to lower-priced brokers remained relevant in 2024 as shippers again used excess capacity to pressure carrier rates.
The Six Stages of Network Dilution
Truckload networks often move from focused start-up freight through complexity and margin compression before disciplined reevaluation and consolidation.
KSMTA Launches New Tool To Help Carriers Grow Their Power Lanes
Lanes of Profit maps lane volume and FreightMath Value so carriers can distinguish dense, profitable power lanes from fragmented spider lanes.
KSMTA Launches New Tool To Help Carriers Develop a Well-Balanced Freight Network
The FreightMath Optimizer selects the most profitable connected loads under practical deadhead, margin, capacity, and customer-commitment constraints.
Are You Dense? Understanding the Importance of Freight Network Density
Concentrating freight inside a defined geographic footprint improves planning, cost certainty, driver fit, velocity, service, and carrier profitability.
Rerouting Revenue: MTC’s Ground Transportation Sourcing Proposal
The MTC proposed replacing mileage-based transportation revenue sourcing with a pickup-and-delivery formula that states could choose to adopt.
KSMTA Launches New Tool: Areas of Profit Interactive Map for Trucking Network Profitability
Areas of Profit maps more than 220 North American markets by volume and network margin, revealing profitable regions and misleading profit mirages.
Discovering the Islands of Profit in Your Network
Carriers can map dense, above-average markets as islands of profit, then use connector freight to bridge them without allowing geographic sprawl.
Proactive Leadership: Nurturing Trust and Independence
Delegation works when leaders share a clear vision, define flexible responsibilities, build trust, and let employees learn through controlled failures.
The Transparency Transformation: Evolving Your Business From Opaque to Open
A staged move from basic communication to open-book management helps employees understand trucking economics and make better operating decisions.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Humble Leadership – The Unseen Force Behind Lasting Success
Humble leaders combine self-awareness and openness with resolve, creating the trust, learning, and disciplined execution that support long-term profit.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Giving Before Receiving
Profitable carriers create giving cultures that improve collaboration and reputation while using boundaries and assertiveness to prevent exploitation.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Investment in Safety Pays Dividends
Benchmarking linked low insurance cost and strong safety scores with profitable carriers, showing why safety investment compounds into lower risk and cost.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Maintenance Excellence – Digging Out of the Deepest, Darkest Hole in Trucking
Maintenance excellence requires standardized cost data, documented repair stances, disciplined PM intervals, inventory control, and executive attention.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Network Discipline – Practicing the Art of Saying No
Network discipline helps carriers identify power and spider lanes, protect a profitable core, and say no to freight that weakens the broader network.
10 Tips for Improving the Utilization of Your TMS: (#2) Shortcuts to Success
Three practical shortcut strategies can help TMS users move through routine tasks faster, reduce wasted motion, and reclaim meaningful time each day.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: The Strength of Weak Ties – Using Connector Freight To Improve Network Profitability
Connector freight can look weak on a one-way basis yet create strong network value when it links profitable markets and is measured with time and margin.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: The Courage To Shrink - Establishing a Minimum Margin Threshold
A minimum margin threshold gives carriers a disciplined basis for costing freight, defining the core network, and right-sizing capacity when returns fall short.
"Come Up for Air" and Focus On Efficiency To Increase the Value of Your Transportation Company
When capital is expensive, transportation companies can create more value by improving operating margins through clearer communication, planning, and processes.
10 Tips for Improving the Utilization of Your TMS: (#1) Internal Subject Matter Experts Are Your Key to Success
Carriers can improve TMS utilization by identifying curious internal experts, sharing their knowledge, and giving them a forum to guide continuous improvement.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Centralized Pricing – A Winning Structure
A centralized, actuarial-style pricing team can help carriers discover better rates, coordinate decisions, protect margins, and prepare for dynamic pricing.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Legacy-Focused Leadership – Playing the Really Long Game
Legacy-focused leadership asks trucking executives to make long-term choices about capacity, innovation, people, and community rather than short-term gains.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Data Sanity Before Data Vanity
Useful trucking metrics expose the actions that improve profit, let users inspect the underlying data, and build a documented playbook for better decisions.
Focus on These Five Ingredients To Transform a Transportation Business
Hubert Joly's five ingredients for unleashing human potential connect employee dreams, trust, autonomy, mastery, and growth to stronger business performance.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Delegation and Empowerment Before Action
Profitable carriers move beyond owner-led doing by aligning people to a clear vision, delegating decisions, allowing failure, and limiting micromanagement.
The 12 Traits of Highly Profitable Trucking Companies: Transparency and Financial Literacy as Core Values
Open financial information creates alignment only when carriers teach employees how revenue, cost, and profit are calculated and how actions affect results.
Trucking Retention Council Helps Companies Stabilize Their Workplace
The Trucking Retention Council brings carriers together to share recruiting and retention data, failures, and practices that can create a more stable workforce.
Carriers: This Freight Economy Downturn Is Different
Carriers facing shipper rate pressure should document cost inflation, analyze customer freight and network fit, and score each shipper before accepting changes.
Creating a Sense of Urgency: Managing Cash Flow and Cost Inflation
Carriers can protect cash by teaching employees trucking economics, shortening the delivery-to-payment cycle, controlling costs, and pricing lanes with data.
Using FreightMath™ To Maximize Price Impact
FreightMath combines variable cost, loaded and empty miles, transit time, and benchmarks to identify lane-specific pricing opportunities and margin impact.
How ‘Cabotage’ Laws Erode Transportation Supply Chain Efficiencies
U.S. and Canadian cabotage restrictions force avoidable empty miles in cross-border trucking and should be revised to permit limited repositioning moves.
6 Tips for Strategically Managing Transportation Brokers
Carriers should treat reputable brokers as strategic sales partners, use them at network edges, negotiate with data, and protect direct customer freight.
Freight Rates: The Games Continue
The 2020 freight-rate dispute reflected shipper-driven rate impairment, not broad price gouging, and called for independent, anonymized pricing transparency.
Back to Reality: The Trucking Industry Grapples With a New Industry Paradigm
Industry leaders meeting in Nashville in 2019 examined driver recruiting, freight-market normalization, insurance risk, per diem plans, and a freight recession.
Do You Know the Value of Your Transportation Company?
Knowing a transportation company's current value supports decisions about insurance, growth, incentives, investment, succession, taxes, and sale timing.
How a Per Diem Program Can Help Drivers and Carriers Save in Taxes
A properly structured accountable per diem plan can replace a lost driver tax deduction, increase take-home pay, and reduce employer payroll taxes.
Trucking Along: Leveraging 2018's Momentum Into 2019
Industry leaders entering 2019 expected slower freight growth but continued opportunity through disciplined KPIs, driver engagement, financing, and compliance.
Knowing Versus Doing: Part 1: Getting the Highest ROI on Your Human Capital
The performance gap between strong and average carriers often comes from execution: turning known priorities into coordinated action instead of complacency.
Enjoying the Ride: Optimizing the Trucking Industry Surge
After trucking's 2017-2018 surge, industry leaders urged carriers to protect momentum through driver strategy, network economics, execution, and planning.
Additional Ways Tax Reform Will Impact the Transportation Industry
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act changed meal and entertainment deductions and created a complex interest-expense limit affecting capital-intensive motor carriers.
Despite Challenges, Trucking Industry Outlook Remains Strong
A 2018 industry roundtable found strong freight demand and rates despite driver constraints, while examining carrier traits, acquisitions, tax, and regulation.
Driver Recruitment and Retention: The Key to Carrier Profitability in 2018
Rising freight rates improve profit only when carriers can seat their trucks, making reliable equipment, home time, communication, and retention pay essential.
Current Trucking Tailwinds May Recede in 2019 According to Pundit: How Should You Prepare?
Carriers should capture strong 2018 rates without assuming they will last, using the favorable cycle to strengthen people, networks, systems, and profitability.
Capitalizing on the Rebound: The Trucking Industry’s Push to Maximize Growth
The 2018 trucking rebound brought stronger volumes, rates, and optimism, but leaders still faced driver turnover, benchmarking, tax reform, and state-law risk.
Maximize Value in the Short-Term for Long-Term Gains
Trucking owners can build enterprise value through a record of EBITDA growth, stronger margins, capable leadership, technology, and network discipline.
Blockchain: How This Emerging Technology Could Transform the Transportation Industry
Blockchain could improve freight-payment speed, cargo security, transaction transparency, data integrity, and chain-of-custody tracking across transportation.
Make Everyone in Your Trucking Company Responsible for Profit
A carrier's management team should share measurable responsibility for profit, replacing sales-only goals with metrics and decisions tied to the bottom line.
Prepare for Change: ELDs, Autonomous Trucks and the Future of Trucking
Industry leaders expected the 2017 ELD mandate to reduce capacity, raise rates, expose detention, and accelerate consolidation before autonomous trucks arrived.
Freight Network Engineering Drives Carrier Profitability
Freight network engineering uses revenue, variable cost, direct cost, and time to improve yield, identify weak freight, and support more profitable decisions.
Trucking Towards State Tax Compliance: Should Your Company Participate in a VDA?
Transportation companies with unfiled state tax exposure may use a voluntary disclosure agreement to limit lookback periods and reduce penalties or interest.
Network Analysis Takes on More Importance
As truckload capacity tightens, carriers need network analytics to distinguish market rates from required rates and allocate trucks to profitable freight.
Driving the Value of Your Trucking Company
A trucking company's value reflects income, market evidence, and net assets, plus cash flow, debt management, drivers, customers, and leadership.
How Large is Your Knowing-Doing Gap?
Trucking performance depends less on finding new management secrets than on turning existing knowledge into action through eight practical disciplines.
Freight Network Optimization Leads to Profitability
Freight network optimization helps truckload carriers replace random load acceptance with a deliberate strategy built around revenue, cost, and time.
Understand Revenue, Optimize Loads to Mitigate ELD-Related Productivity Losses
ELD data can expose productivity losses, identify two-day 'tweener' loads, and show where length-of-haul pricing must change to protect daily margin.
Optimism Abounds: Happy Days May Be Returning to the Trucking Industry
KSM's 2017 Trucking Owners Business Roundtable examined an improving freight economy, benchmarking, regulation, and the coming lease-accounting changes.
Combatting Rate Reductions: How to Strengthen Your Negotiating Position Through Freight Network Engineering
Lane-level freight network analysis gives carriers a third response to shipper rate cuts: negotiate the portions of the business that fit the network.
The Challenge of Analyzing Rates When Fuel Prices Change Rapidly
Rapid fuel-price changes can distort comparisons between current carrier rates and older market indexes when both rates include a fuel surcharge component.
Metrics Matter: Know Your Numbers to Improve Trucking Profitability
Accurate trucking benchmarks depend on consistent definitions for miles, revenue, and truck counts; small definition changes can alter costs and pricing.
Paradigm Shift: Linehaul + Fuel Surcharge is the New Linehaul
Because shipper fuel-surcharge methods vary widely, carriers should compare total linehaul plus fuel surcharge rather than linehaul rates alone.
What is Your Trucking Company Worth?
A trucking company's worth reflects future cash flow, market evidence, net asset value, and intangible strengths such as drivers, customers, and management.