A natural inclination for frugality is a winning quality for most anybody in the world today, I’d wager, and no doubt an owner-operator. That's one of the central qualities Jay Hosty, our Trucker of the Month for April, put dead center of his now 41-year-long history of success as an owner-operator in trucking. As Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole wrote in our profile of owner-operator Hosty last week, he got his start in trucking as an owner pulling containers around New Orleans, Louisiana, at the young age of 19 in 1981.
Frugality's certainly served him well during the last year and a half’s rising costs, yet it only goes so far after a couple of years' worth of getting used to $4/mile freight. The squeeze is on, coming from both sides of the profit equation.
"It's hard to come back to the reality of $2/mile freight," Hosty said, and thus far in 2023 his net income's a bit behind where it sat this time last year. In part, it's the luxury of being freight-choosy at work there. He's spent more time sitting at the house in Diamondhead, Mississippi, this year, waiting on profitable loads from one of a couple of nearby Landstar agents he works with regularly to take him outbound.
[Related: Enter Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year award competition]
Hosty’s been leased to Landstar now for most of the last two decades, pulling today in a 2006 Western Star that replaced a 2000 model, after the truck was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, when he and wife, Katt, were living in Gulfport, Mississippi. They lost their house there, too, with the direct hit. The comeback from that disaster is made all the more remarkable by the family the Hostys have fostered throughout their entire four decades together.
