Carrier survey reveals optimism for trucking market in 2025

Matt Cole:
How carriers feel about the trucking market coming into 2025,

Jason Cannon:
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Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm Jason Cannon and my co-host is Matt Cole. The trucking economy has been bouncing along the floor for what seems like an eternity, especially for those of us living in it day to day with signs of life in the market surfacing late last year. There is some optimism among carriers this year,

Matt Cole:
Trucking Load Board and Freight Marketplace Truck Stop recently released the results of its carrier insight survey, which gauged the sentiment of nearly 500 carriers about the upcoming year.

Brent Hutto:
Every quarter we go out to the marketplace and ask them kind of like to get a pulse survey. And so it's called the Insights Report, carrier Insights Survey, but it's really just to kind get a temperature on how the carrier marketplace is doing. And so for Truck Stop, we're fully in the spot market, which means our demographic typically in the spot market of customers is going to be about 80% are going to be owner operators and 20% are going to be small fleets. And there's some large fleets and stuff in there too, but predominantly it's those one to nine owner operators, class eight trucks, long haul owner operators, four hire, they all have to be four hire. And then about 20% of them are small fleets, fully in the sort of the 10, mostly 10 to 50 category. And then we do business with several, several thousand shippers in the marketplace.

But we just asked carriers this question, but we did a little different this time. We spread it out. We ask our customers to give us their feedback, and we also ask the carrier marketplace because we have a tremendous amount of carriers that come to us on the front end because when a leased owner operator is looking to become an independent, they're always searching around about how's the marketplace doing? So they're going to come to Truck Stop and look from the front end of our website for information, our media post, our blogs, my podcast, and they're just going to kind of continue to look. And so we tend to go out to a broad audience. So this respondent was Truck stop customers and the open carrier marketplace.

Jason Cannon:

As tough as the post covid environment has been for trucking companies, the vast majority of carriers responding to Truck Stop Survey are optimistic about business in 2025.

Brent Hutto:
When you think about small carriers and you think about trucking in general, we as an industry, we can be a bit pessimistic, no doubt, and rightfully so. Sometimes we're not respected enough. Sometimes people don't really realize the value. The pandemic helped most consumers realize the value of what trucking brings to America, which is just about everything. I got five kids and I'm thankful for truckers every day of my life and I'm glad to be in this industry, but I think about this and the pandemic created a great marketplace for 26 months for any carrier. You were making more money if you're a carrier than you ever made in the history since deregulation in 1980. And it wasn't a few months, it was a lot of months. And then here's the thing, we came down for about the same amount of months, about 26 months for the market to correct.

Notice the word I use, correct? Because supply and demand marketplaces, and that's what freight is because it is a derived demand of the US economy. It's very important to know that. So we came back down, but here's what happened, and we always live in the present, and this is why 91% of the carriers expressed confidence or optimism into the 20 20 25 marketplace. It's because the marketplace fully corrected. I say it started it kind of freight availability corrected in October of 2022. Other participants in the market will tell you about May, 2023. After that, the marketplace began to fully correct sort of in the numbers and began to shift back to normal in the marketplace. And when there's normal, truckers are just optimistic because you know what? They've been around a long time and they know how the marketplace goes up and down. The reason why I think they're optimistic is first off, truckers are super resilient.

I mean, resilient is crazy. I mean, they're tough. They're in trucking because they love trucking and it's not just a job. They love what they do, and that's one thing why I love 'em so much. But they know the marketplace will come back up. And so just that idea that they're seeing rates come up gives more optimism because that's the thing that they measure the most as far as that. And there's more in this research, but to me is what I see. And we see tons of data. We see the most fresh data inside of transportation as I see that. And listen to our carrier customers, our owner operators. Boy, that's pretty much what they say.

Matt Cole:
Fraud has become a major issue in trucking in recent years. But survey respondents seem to think improvements are on the horizon.

Brent Hutto:
Fraud is now the first filter. So whether you are an owner operator, whether you're a brokerage division, whether you're a fleet that owns a brokerage or whether you're a shipper that uses them, fraud is the first filter. What do I mean by that? I mean that you've got to make sure that the person you're talking to or doing business with is the person you think you're doing business with that's completely authentic and licensed and an active participant in a legal participant in our industry. Because what happened during the last 10 years, the reason why this came up was that transportation has kind of become sexy from the investment world. In the last 10 years. There's been billions and billions and billions of dollars have come into transportation because they realized how important it is and how kind of scalable it can be and how necessary.

And so as automation is coming to our marketplace, automation of data, that means these nefarious organized crime and criminals that can hide behind a computer, come and start stealing things like freight payments, they start stealing identity so they can do strategic theft and they can steal 10 or 20 loads over couple of day period and they can pretend to be somebody else. And so the marketplace has responded with certain different technologies come out. There's been a lot of good ones out there. We're thankful for them. And Truck Stop certainly was one of them that took our product that never was designed to be a fraud product. It was designed to be a data control product and made it a fraud product, but that's just part of adjusting to the market. But it is really good to see that 82% of the respondents felt like it was going to improve and almost 30% thought there'd be major gains in it.

And I'll tell you, this is the big deal. This is the super big deal. The technology companies have done what they can do in a system to help prevent these things. Now it's all the external players. So if you're on the outside of a technology platform, and that's every carrier, every broker, every shipper understand how to protect your system. So cybersecurity needs to be really big. Data integrity needs to be really big. Data purification needs to be really big. And I think that's why you're seeing this because the marketplace has responded. By the way, fraud theft does not mean now cargo theft has not predominantly gone down. We're just managing it better.

Jason Cannon:
With increased optimism in the freight market, carriers are also planning to invest in equipment and in their business this year. 

Brent Hutto:
When margins are thin, you cut everything you can and not just margins. Inflation caused a lot of things first. During the pandemic, every fleet in America had to, and owner operators had an issue, not the same issue, but if Fleet in America had to raise their compensation for their drivers, so you got your labor base costs going up, you got your insurance because of inflation going way up 25, 30%, sometimes more. Oh my goodness. So your base costs are going up. So there was an underinvestment. You had to do it. You wanted to try to be profitable. And so if you own a hundred trucks, you got to turn over a certain percent of them, the maintenance will kill you. So yeah, there's going to be more investment. But if I just look at carriers on the owner operator end, it is good to hear that 77% of 'em are looking to do improvements on their operations.

And the great thing about and what most people don't know about owner operators is that they can change their operation in a day. If you own a hundred trucks, it takes you six months. If you own a thousand trucks, you're a year or two years getting things implemented into your operation. So that idea of investing into the equipment that you use is a constant thing. And it's good to see. It shows you that maybe profitability is coming back to the more healthy extent that it needs to be, whether it be the contract marketplace or the spot marketplace or the LTL marketplace or the intermodal marketplace or the drayage marketplace. Just name 'em more profitability is coming back. And I think a pro administration helps that when it comes to less friction when it comes to regulations. And look, I have no problem with the F-M-C-S-A, really appreciate what the teams do there because they've really been much more open in the last five or six years or maybe even more than that, where they're listening, they're listening to the industry, but there's always going to be problems to solve within our marketplace.

Matt Cole:
Truckstop also found an increased focus from owner operators on their personal health.

Brent Hutto:
Obviously we want want to keep owner operators in business because it's good for our business, but that's the selfish part. Okay? The unselfish part we try to be is that it's good for our nation that we have healthy truck drivers. It's not a healthy job. You sit most of the time you're in a piece of equipment that vibrates and moves, which has problems on your internal organs and all this, but most all of it can be overcome a proper eating and proper movement. Like you're just move more often. And so we've been behind this for quite a while. We support a lot of what let's Truck does, and I'm going to move an interviewing people lately on my podcast that are about all about the health of trucking because usually it doesn't take much to move the needle. And when you think about that, trucking's not a young industry.

We're not a bunch of 25 year olds. We're a bunch of 45 to 60 year olds. And so that's when it's hard on your life. And so the idea that it was really, really good to see that a good percentage of them were looking on increasing their activities that would relate to really good health, that made me excited because we need great truck drivers in this marketplace and their health. If the main engine, which is you as a human being, has a problem, the truck doesn't run, man. And so it was really cool to see that over 75% of them were wanting to just improve their eating habits because if you can improve the quality that goes in, and I really think that go back to the administration, that sort of, it's all about the focus in life, man. It's all about what are you putting in your brain If you're putting in your brain, yeah, I can't eat that highly processed sugar.

I can't consume those enriched products. I need to eat whole foods. I need to feed foods that are better for my body, better for my engine, that's a really good thing. So to see that 76% are, we're looking towards that. I think it's driven a lot by what they hear every day. You're hearing now from the administration coming in about health, just about being healthy. And so I mean, look, it takes whatever motivates you and can hold you accountable because man, I love when truckers retire because they're too old, not because their health takes 'em out.

Jason Cannon:
Brent says that Truck stop is also optimistic about 2025 for a couple of different reasons.

Brent Hutto:
So why is truck stop optimistic about 2025? Two reasons that relate to trucking and trucking operations, whether you're an owner operator, whether you're a small fleet, large fleet, medium fleet brokerage company, is that freight in the United States. Even through all these last, even through the post pandemic correction, everything came down, the freight availability or the volumes of freight in the marketplace stayed above the predicted trend. So we have more freight than was predicted to be in the marketplace. And we have a chief economist, Noah Perry, who's in my opinion, the best economist in the marketplace. One reason because he is been doing it for 50 years and he has a perspective, plus he's never super optimistic. He's always on the pessimistic side. So I kind of trust that when he says, I'm optimistic about this, so that when there's more freight, there's more opportunity for people to chase their dream and own a trucking company.

And so then I look at that and I look at what I hear from shippers. And so I've talked to shippers all year long, on and off big ones, medium and small ones. And boy, they love their transportation providers. They tell me that they're looking to give back some percentage of rate growth in 2025 as they go through their bids, whether it be in the contract marketplace or through their brokerage companies do business with through the spot market is they're looking to give back anywhere from three to 8% depending on the part of the marketplace. And here's the thing, if we got 16% increase in the spot market in 2024 over 2023, I'm super optimistic about what it's going to do for owner operators and fleets in 2025. And then, so 2025 will be a normal correction rate marketplace. And then I think the predictions are 2026 Now, try not to go more than a year in advance just because while that's hard is that 2026 should be an overall much better year for trucking in the profitability.

Jason Cannon:
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