→FreightMath powers Pricing Intelligence — what-ifs on density, utilization, and OR
→Currently in Paid Alpha — top truckload operators on the platform, actively responding to RFPs
20×
Faster bid generation
+5%
Above market · 2+ yrs · Nussbaum
The FreightMath Alliance
Carriers running on data, not instinct.
→Meets twice per year
→Share best practices across member carriers
→Collaborate to improve FreightMath & FreightMarks
→Peer benchmarking via FreightMarks
"Before FreightMath, explaining our costs was an uphill battle. Now the data speaks for itself."
Michael McGovern · COO, Leonard's Express
A new chapter at KSM Transport Advisors
Welcome to the team
Brad Heisterkamp joins KSMTA as Vice President.
Brad Heisterkamp
Vice President · KSM Transport Advisors
20+
Years of truckload leadership
Operations · pricing · network strategy · sales
→Former FreightMath client and advanced practitioner of the model — he knows the platform from the customer side.
→A strong industry communicator with deep carrier operating experience.
Previously
Ascend·NFI·Transco Lines·CRST
FreightMarks Benchmarks · Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025
Section · The numbers behind your peers
Where do you stand?
Twelve operating benchmarks. Three modes. Median values from the FreightMarks Alliance. Q1 2026 versus the same quarter a year ago.
Apples-to-Apples
Same-carrier cohort, both periods. We isolated the carriers that reported in both Q1 2025 and Q1 2026 and ran the benchmarks against that fixed cohort — so the YoY shifts you see are real operating changes, not the result of new members entering or leaving the dataset.
OTR Only
Dedicated operations are excluded. FreightMath segments OTR from Dedicated at the load level, so what you see here is one-way OTR economics — not a blended OTR + Dedicated number that would mask the real spread between the two business models.
Quarters of sustained margin compression. The longest sustained downturn in the modern history of North American truckload.
03 / 23
Sources: FreightWaves, FMCSA, KSM Transport Advisors
Frame the moment
A different kind of recovery
The old playbook is dead.
Every recovery you remember was demand-led. This one isn't. The floor is rising because operators pricing below cost are being removed, not because people ordered more stuff on Amazon.
Previous Recoveries
Demand-led
Capacity returned quickly
Rate spikes were temporary
Non-compliant operators survived
Recovery rewarded everyone
This Recovery
Supply-led
Capacity removed structurally
Rate floors being enforced
Non-compliant operators eliminated
Recovery rewards the compliant
04 / 23
Why structural matters
Market concentration · Herfindahl-Hirschman Index
The freest of free markets.
In a hyper-competitive market where no operator can set a price floor, the regulatory floor is the floor.
Search (Alphabet)
~7,800
Desktop OS (Microsoft)
~5,500
Parcel (UPS/FedEx)
3,600
DOJ "Concentrated"
2,500
Class I Rail
2,000
U.S. Airlines
1,800
DOJ "Unconcentrated"
1,500
Truckload Trucking
50–100
⤷ Truckload sits ~100× below Microsoft · ~150× below Alphabet
0
Active U.S. carriers
97% operate 20 trucks or fewer. No single operator can set price discipline. Strip away enforcement and you don't have a free market — you have an unregulated one.
That's the cumulative dollar amount of margin you ceded to operators who externalized the costs you absorbed. Now multiply by the carriers who didn't survive.
Annual run-rate gap$1.33M
Non-compliant miles · period8.21M
Per truck · per year$132,860
07 / 23
Methodology: Fleet × Non-compliant miles/wk × 52 × Gap/mi × Years · 2,100 mi/wk shown as the compliant baseline reference
Enforcement is holding the broom
Six enforcement actions · one direction · no reversal
The broom.
The Regulation : Enforcement gap is closing.
Not one regulation. Six. Simultaneously. On both sides of the border. None of it is going to be reversed.
01
MOTUS
PPOB Verification · 400–500 ghost offices
Chameleon carriers can no longer recycle DOT numbers. 48-hour records inspection rule.
02
ELP Enforcement
19,000+ violations · 10,000 sidelined
English Language Proficiency revocations — not just OOS. CDLs being pulled by states.
03
Non-Domiciled CDL
60,000 improperly issued · CA alone
CDL credentialing system rebuilt from scratch. Massive license invalidation underway.
04
ELD Tampering = OOS
Effective April 1, 2026 · 42 ELDs purged
Falsify a log, park the truck. 238 new ELDs blocked from self-certifying.
05
CDL Mill Purge
7,000+ fraudulent training providers
Entry-level driver training fraud being unwound. Graduates being re-tested or removed.
06
Driver Inc. / CRA
Canada Budget 2025 · permanent funding
Cross-border misclassification crackdown is now a permanent enforcement apparatus.
08 / 23
Sources: FMCSA, Overdrive, FreightWaves, CRA
The capacity that's leaving
The math of removal
5%–12% of the active driver pool. Removed. Permanently (hopefully).
ELP Non-Compliance
3–5%
Non-Domiciled CDL Revocations
1–3%
ELD Tampering OOS
1–2%
Chameleon Carrier Shutdowns
<1%
CDL Mill Graduate Removals
<1%
Carrier failures · current pace
~1,000–1,500/wk
0
Of the U.S. driver pool
214,000 to 437,000 drivers removed over 24–36 months
This is not a workforce reduction — it is the belated application of standards that should have been enforced all along. They are not coming back.
09 / 23
Survivor playbook · Lesson 1 of 9
01
Profit before growth.
The carriers still standing chose margin over the truck count.
Margin is too low in good times, considering the extreme risks that carriers face on a daily basis. You must have a profit-first mentality.
Carriers that survived the downturn had to make many tough decisions — park tractors, cut customers, lay-off support staff.
Growth is a multiplier. If your underlying gross margins are negative, growth multiplies the loss. Survivors learned that fleet contraction is not a failure mode, it is a discipline.
"You cannot out-volume a bad cost structure. The only way to grow profitably is to be profitable first."
10 / 23
Survivor playbook · Lesson 2 of 9
02
Cut the D and C players.
Unprofitable customers, lanes, poor performing support staff, out of network drivers, unsupportive vendors.
You must understand who your A, B, C, and D players are. Through the boom, many carriers carried the C's and D's because revenue from shippers covered the obligations. The depression made that subsidy unaffordable. The survivors ran the same triage on three lists at once:
CUSTOMER LIST
Identify the toxic customers
Based on gross and net margin (OR) — not revenue. Your biggest customer is rarely your most profitable.
LANE LIST
Network discipline is key
Density drives Efficiency. Efficiency drives Velocity. Velocity drives Profitability.
Subtraction is a strategy.
11 / 23
Survivor playbook · Lesson 3 of 9
Every carrier's balance sheet is bruised. What matters is what you did with it.
Cash is King. Clean up and protect the balance sheet.
The downturn forced discipline most carriers had never needed. Many flexed in ways they hadn't before — and came out structurally stronger for it.
Equipment
Age by necessity. Gain by capability.
Forced to hold equipment longer, carriers developed maintenance capabilities and cost discipline they never had before.
Debt
Creative refinancing.
Locking fixed rates, restructuring equipment loans, extending terms — survivors found flexibility before they needed it.
Assets
Park what doesn't contribute to overhead.
Idle tractors, underused trailers, surplus equipment. If it isn't generating revenue to cover its costs, it's a drag on every load that is.
The lesson
Bruised — not broken.
The carriers who protected their balance sheet through the depression entered the recovery with acquisition capacity. The others are the acquisition.
12 / 23
Survivor playbook · Lesson 4 of 9
The downturn was made worse by those who held the pen.
Shippers made it harder. You still had to manage through it.
Payment Terms
Shippers extended terms. Carriers absorbed the float.
Net-60 and Net-90 became normalized during the downturn
Carriers who accepted without negotiating gave away margin twice
DSO by customer is part of the true cost of the freight
Every day of extended terms is a day your cash funds their business
Programs like Breakthrough restructured FSC in shippers' favour
OPIS vs DOE/EIA basis risk is real and quantifiable
A bad FSC program can turn a profitable lane into a loss
Negotiate FSC terms as hard as you negotiate rate
FSC is pricing
treat it like one — every time
The shipper had the leverage. The survivors knew their numbers well enough to push back.
13 / 23
Survivor playbook · Lesson 5 of 9
05
Your lender should be a partner, not a vendor.
In a 13-quarter downturn, the relationship is the covenant.
The carriers who made it through almost universally had two things in common with their banks: radical transparency and early conversations. The casualties showed up to the lender in Q3 with bad news the lender first heard about that morning. The survivors brought the bad news in Q1 with a plan attached.
Equipment finance and re-finance, A/R lines — every credit instrument was renegotiated under stress. Lenders who knew the operator and the model were willing to flex covenants. Lenders who had been kept at arm's length pulled the line. The difference was almost never the financials. It was the relationship that preceded them.
A truckload OTR carrier is a 95-OR business in good times. Pick lending partners who understand that — and treat them like partners.
14 / 23
Survivor playbook · Lesson 6 of 9
06
Trucking for fun is no fun.
"Fun freight" is any load you take for reasons other than its contribution to the network.
Every fleet has it: the load you take because the customer's been with you 20 years. The lane you keep because the dispatcher likes the driver who runs it. The freight you accept because saying no feels worse than the loss. Cultural habit. Convenience. Not strategy.
FreightMath data is unambiguous on this: freight moved inside a strategic footprint runs 20–25% more profitable than freight moved outside it. Profitability is cumulative — and so is the bleed from "small, justifiable" losses.
Four years of shipper-driven concessions trained carriers to discount before the phone even rang. The market has shifted. Your pricing posture has to shift with it.
The depression conditioned operators to anticipate the customer's "no" — and bake it into the opening ask. Rates went in below what the market would actually bear, before any negotiation even started. The survivors broke that habit. They went in with numbers that reflected real cost-to-serve and a defensible margin, prepared to walk if the customer wouldn't move. Now is the time to go get your increases.
ANCHOR HIGHER
Open with cost truth, not yesterday's price
FreightMath gives you the floor — the all-in, lane-level cost to serve. Anything below it is a subsidy you can't afford to write twice.
ALIGN THE TEAM
Sales, ops, and finance on one number
If a salesperson, dispatcher, or controller doesn't believe the rate, the customer never will. Everyone on the team has to get on board with asking for more — or the ask never lands.
If your team doesn't believe the rate, your customer never will.
Survivor playbook · Lesson 9 of 9
09
Safety is a pricing advantage. Don't cut it.
Top-quartile carriers run under $0.06 of insurance per mile. Bottom-quartile carriers run over $0.20. That gap was earned — both directions — over a decade.
Insurance cost per mile isn't an underwriting outcome. It's the cumulative product of years of capital choices most operators can't bring themselves to make: cameras, telematics, driver training, hiring discipline, the slow no on the marginal CDL. The carriers in the bottom of the chart got there by deferring all of it. The carriers at the top got there by doing the opposite — for ten years — and now carry a 14-cent-per-mile structural edge into every RFP.
TOP QUARTILE
<$0.06
Insurance · per mile
BOTTOM QUARTILE
$0.20+
Insurance · per mile
STRUCTURAL GAP
14¢
Per mile · before fuel or driver pay
Safety is the rare investment whose payoff compounds. You can't buy it in Q4. You earn it over a decade.
The autonomy runway · 10–15 years
Autonomy unfolds in phases. Use the runway.
Gradual now. Material by the mid-2030s.
Four overlapping phases over the next ten to fifteen years. None of them are cliffs — but the carriers who position early earn the compounding advantage.
2026 — 2029
Corridor Phase
Hub-to-hub autonomous corridors mature across the Sun Belt (TX, AZ, NM). Early-adopter carriers begin testing select lanes.
2028 — 2032
Semi-Autonomous Phase
Driver-assist extends productive hours on long corridors. A new digital compliance layer arrives in parallel — telemetry, real-time logging, and system audits — rewarding carriers with clean data and tight operations.
2030 — 2035
Scale Phase
Autonomous middle-mile becomes cost-competitive on a meaningful share of linehaul. Regulatory frameworks mature. Hybrid networks — driver-led plus autonomous — become the operating norm.
2034 — 2040+
Who Knows?
Autonomous truck providers (Aurora, Kodiak, Plus, Waabi, etc.) could disintermediate traditional carriers entirely — contracting directly with shippers and capturing the linehaul margin. Or the hybrid model holds and carriers retain the relationship. Anyone forecasting 15 years out with confidence isn't telling you the truth.
The wildcardHow much will the government allow — or restrict?
AI isn't waiting for the truck
It's already in your back office.
AI is here. The 10× reward is for early adopters.
$
Pricing
AI-driven RFP response eliminates information asymmetry between you and the shipper.
≈
Brokerage
AI matching compresses broker margins, disintermediates the middle of the load board.
⚙
Operations
Automated dispatch, predictive maintenance, route optimization at the load level.
∑
Finance
Load-level profitability visible in real time via Activity-Based Costing.
★
Compliance
MOTUS, ARCHI and AI-powered enforcement tools make it harder to hide.
20 / 23
Close
You carried proper insurance. You employed your drivers. You maintained your equipment. You paid your taxes. You competed against operators who did none of that — for 13 quarters.
You didn't just survive. You proved your model works.
Now it's time to recoup. The market is finally working in your favour.
Rate discipline
Hold your floor. The compliant are in control now.
Network discipline
Build back on profitable freight. Not just any freight.
Know your numbers
You earned this window. Don't leave margin on the table.
Chris Henry · KSM Transport Advisors · FreightMath, not Emotion.
