Top 50 Trucking: What sets the best apart?

For trucking industry executives, running an efficient and profitable carrier in a notoriously thin-margin business starts with one key element: vision.

Carrier leaders are constantly looking ahead—anticipating where the industry will be in five years, what services shippers will demand (and pay for), and how their operations fit into the broader landscape of the $931 billion trucking industry.

“In particular for the truckload segment, the most important thing for me is that ‘vision,’” says Satish Jindel, principal of S.J. Consulting, a firm that closely tracks the trucking industry. “What business are these carriers in and how do they differentiate one from other competitors?”

The need for that company-specific efficiency comes at a time when the trucking industry as a whole has largely been static—or perhaps a touch worse. It’s a derived-demand industry, and carriers can only haul what shippers tend to them. And lately that demand has been tepid.

Yet, the best of the best remain profitable and growing. Less-than-truckload (LTL) juggernaut Old Dominion Freight Line (ODFL) remains a growth story on Wall Street. Privately held LTL innovator Pitt Ohio recently expanded its national footprint with the acquisition of Sutton Transport, a 45-year-old Midwest regional LTL trucking company based in Weston, Wisc.

“We focus on our people, listen to our customers and, we do what we say we’re going to do,” says Geoff Muessig, Pitt Ohio’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

Let’s take our annual deep dive into the nation’s Top 50 trucking companies—25 LTL and 25 truckload (TL)—to see what the best of the best are doing to cement their leadership positions for shippers, shareholders, and their industry.

 

How they do it

Analyst Jindel says that for the past 30-plus years, there has been “no significant development” in how truckers price their service and the visibility for what they’re doing for the customers—shippers and receivers.

Truck drivers are still paid by the mile. That’s a distinct monetary disadvantage when there are major delays due to bad weather, highway construction or accidents, as drivers bear the cost of those—even though it might take four hours to travel 60 miles.

“Hence, you get driver turnover,” says Jindel, noting large TL carriers can have annual turnover rates approaching 100%. In other words, you need 200 drivers a year for your 100-truck fleet.

A recent study by the American Trucking Research Institute (ATRI) estimated that delays due to congestion cost the trucking industry at least $108 billion a year. Yet shippers continue to waste drivers’ time at loading or unloading docks by refusing to add more doors to their facilities or strong-arming the carriers by refusing to pay detention time, says Jindel.

“Carriers have not found a way to deal with it, turning their service into a commodity where a carrier with 1,000 trucks has no perceived advantage over a carrier with 100 trucks,” Jindel says.

But LTL carriers have carved out a service and productivity mix that differentiates the best from the rest. “The best carriers continue to have discipline in selecting the shipments and shippers they want to work with and having a proper pricing approach to ensure they are rewarded for their service,” adds Jindel.

Unlike TL carriers, the best LTL carriers are able to differentiate themselves from others. They invest in their people (thus lower turnover) and in technology (thus better ability to manage cost and service).

“In the post-deregulation era that started in 1980, during the ensuing 30-plus years, the supply of carriers exceeded demand and market conditions allowed shippers to command the lowest price,” says Peter Latta, chairman and CEO of A. Duie Pyle, one of the nation’s largest LTL carriers.

Pyle is a 101-year-old company that has learned to roll with the punches, says Latta. “We take a long view and reinvest the profits we earn back into the business.” A recent example is the multi-million-dollar investment to equip its entire fleet with forward road facing, side view and rear back up cameras.

“Our industry justifiably laments about the inequities of our legal system and egregious jury verdicts,” adds Latta. “We believe that the 360-degree camera system investment we installed across our entire fleet are the type of investments that not only serve to protect the motorists we share the roads with, but also will help our company, and our industry. To the extent other carriers make this investment, it will more fairly balance our jurisprudence system.”

The Knight-Swift factor

Knight-Swift, the nation’s 2nd-largest TL carrier after J.B. Hunt, has been active in buying terminals from the defunct Yellow Corp. It’s part of a long-developed strategy to enter the $56 billion LTL market.

Knight-Swift spent about $2.2 million to acquire 10 Yellow Corp. terminal leases in the western U.S. Three were in Idaho, two each in Colorado and Kansas, one each in Missouri, Nebraska, and Georgia. Knight-Swift had truckload-related revenue of $3.9 billion in the last year for which full results are available.

Knight-Swift’s LTL plan is to have complete 48-state coverage sometime this year. It entered the LTL arena about three years ago.

“We’re excited to take the next step toward building a nationwide LTL business, and especially to grow our network to include the key Southwest markets of California, Arizona, and Nevada,” said Knight-Swift CEO Adam Miller in a statement.

Knight-Swift recently bought operating assets and assumed certain liabilities of the non-union regional LTL division of Los Angeles-based Dependable Highway Express (DHE). That added to Knight-Swift’s LTL terminal and door counts by approximately 10% and brought its coverage of the U.S. population to approximately 70%.

Another trend in the $459 billion truckload market is the growing presence of dedicated fleets. Those are fleets “dedicated” to one customer, or group of customers, for essentially the same runs inbound and outbound from raw materials to final customers.

Schneider, the nation’s 3rd-largest truckload carrier, recently expanded its dedicated fleet capacity by buying Cowan Systems, a primarily East Coast TL carrier, for approximately $390 million. This follows earlier acquisitions of dedicated contract carriers Midwest Logistics Systems and M&M Transport Services, which are also wholly owned subsidiaries of Schneider.

Schneider’s purchase of Cowan is the largest dedicated acquisition since Werner Enterprises acquired ReedTMS Logistics, a brokerage and dedicated truckload company, in November 2022. But analysts say more acquisitions in this space could be coming.

Werner, the nation’s 6th-largest truckload operator, has had a long-time dedicated presence with Dollar General, parent of the discount grocery chain. Others seem to be trying to copy Werner’s success.

 

The people factor

What attributes are most important to a trucking company, day in and day out? Is it vision? Planning? Execution? People?

“Frankly, it’s all four,” says Chuck Hammel, president of Pitt Ohio. “Vision is the easy part. With people,
 it’s creating an atmosphere of caring and an employee-first environment. Too many companies ignore this part or talk like they care, but their actions don’t support their words. The execution part is where you make your money.”

“It’s a mix of all the above,” says Greg Plemmons, chief operating officer at ODFL. “For us, it’s our ODFL family. They’ve really bought in on the mission and drive it day in and day out. We hear that from customers. I love it when customers will name a driver or customer dispatcher. We get that almost daily. It is the people behind that success that make us.”

Pricing to be the best

Our Annual Top 50 carriers list, complied by the team at S.J. Consulting and ShipMatrix, doesn’t change all that much from year to year. But over the decades, it’s the list of carriers that are no longer on that list that’s most enlightening.

Gone is Consolidated Freightways, which closed in 2003. Ditto for Yellow, which ceased operations two years ago. Overnite, founded in 1935, morphed to a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad then to a unit of UPS to being sold to Canada-based TFI.

Thousands of smaller “mom-and-pop” carriers also folded in the decades following motor carrier deregulation in 1980. New England Motor Freight was one of the largest LTL carriers in the Northeast when it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019 and subsequently shut down all operations in 2020.

“Staying on top requires you to do a lot of things right, both internally and externally,” says Pitt Ohio’s Hammel. “Internally, we spend a lot of time looking at ourselves from the employee point of view. We need the employee to love what they do as well as the company they work for in order for them to give our customers the best service.”

Externally, Hammel says that Pitt Ohio keeps its finger on the pulse of the market and changing customer needs. “We’re able to work with customers individually to create a solution as their needs change,” he adds. Most of these solutions require developing customized technology to bring all of their internal needs together—and the same thing has happened with rates.

But a major change beginning in March in LTL pricing can be summarized in three letters: KYC, or Know Your Classification. The optimists are hoping that these changes will create dialogues with carriers to find common ways to cut costs and create efficiencies in freight moves and dock practices.

“The overall goal of this is modernization,” says Richard Ellis, vice president of pricing for Estes Express and a 40-year trucking veteran. Major changes in the National Motor Freight Traffic Association’s National Motor Freight Classification (NMFC) have taken effect as of the first quarter of 2025.

The first group of reclassifications affects about 2,500 classifications, or about 30% of all LTL freight, Ellis estimated. In the meantime, carriers are hoping shippers will see this as an opportunity to engage in better negotiations with them so they can outperform their competition. Other shippers will see it as a threat to their business if it causes their LTL costs to go up.

“This is arguably the most important change—after motor carrier deregulation—in pricing in the history of the LTL industry,” says Mike Regan, chief relationship officer and founder of TranzAct. “Pricing in the LTL space has been typically more art than science, but that’s changing.”

Although carriers still routinely announce “general rate increases” effective the first of each year, few shippers pay those list tariffs. Rather, they’re used as a base off which carriers aggressively discount their services.

“It’s customer by customer, based on the data of that account,” says ODFL’s Plemmons. “We’re an open book when it comes to costing a particular account. There are ways to move costs out of the equation. It’s never a surprise to our customers when we secure a rate increase.”

According to Plemmons, ODFL has averaged 4.5% rate increases over recent years. “We feel pretty good about where we are,” he adds. “And it speaks well to our value proposition.”

Secure business, fill the truck, deliver it on time—and get paid appropriately. Trucking can be such an easy game.

­—John D. Schulz is a contributing editor for SCMR

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