My trucking career includes the highest and lowest experiences an owner can have: growing a large, sophisticated carrier, losing it in Chapter 11, and later returning to build the advisory work that became KSM Transport Advisors and FreightMath.
A Family Built on Freight
I am a third-generation trucker. My grandfather, Carroll Roush, helped co-found Roadway Express in the late 1920s. My father, David “Dave” Roush, built and sold O.N.C., a large California LTL carrier, and later created ROCOR International, a truckload holding company.
My formal career began after college in 1981, but trucking had always been part of my life. Drivers joined our family at the dinner table, Saturdays were often spent at the office, and every summer job during high school and college involved the industry. I worked as a shop boy and in central dispatch, safety, logs, mileage lookup, rating, and other functions. During the Teamsters strike in the early 1970s, I even had a bodyguard.
Learning the Business the Hard Way
After college, I worked in dispatch, driver management, marketing, customer service, management information systems, and sales. Eventually, I became president of a 3,000-truck company operating in truckload, port services, inbound traffic management, and freight brokerage.
The organization used company equipment, owner-operators, lease-purchase drivers, agents, brokers, and other capacity models. It operated terminals across the country and purchased more than 30 trucking companies, many of them turnarounds. Every assignment added lessons about leadership, systems, and scale.
Déjà Vu: Then and Now
The market of that period resembles the current freight recession in several ways. Deregulation opened the industry to thousands of new carriers and intensified rate competition. Brokers and logistics intermediaries grew as shippers looked for help managing capacity and price volatility. Transportation decisions moved away from local traffic managers toward more centralized and increasingly automated procurement.
What We Did Right and Wrong
Our company did many things well. We focused on leading and lagging indicators, produced complex financial statements quickly, integrated technology into operating processes, used a sophisticated predecessor of FreightMath for pricing and lane selection, and built a driver-centered culture grounded in dignity.
Our critical error was pursuing aggressive growth in a terrible market. We continued to spend, invest, and leverage assets because we believed we could outlast other carriers and become a billion-dollar company when the cycle recovered.
The headwinds eventually overwhelmed that strategy. In 2002, we filed Chapter 11, and the company’s assets were sold through the bankruptcy estate.
Watching a company built over years dissolve was devastating. It was also the most consequential business education I received.
Rebuilding and Returning
I left trucking for five years after the bankruptcy. In 2007, I returned and founded Top Line Advisors, which became the foundation for KSM Transport Advisors and FreightMath.
Why This Story Matters
I share the history because I understand the difficulty of fighting through a freight recession and the value of surviving it. The experience behind KSMTA’s work was not acquired only through analysis; it was also formed through operating, failing, rebuilding, and returning to the industry with a different understanding of risk.