Owner-operator Kelvin Schmidt, Trucker of the Month for January in Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year program, didn't come to a formula for enduring success without a tour through the proverbial school of hard knocks, as it were. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, hear his own account of his start as a flatbed-pulling hotshotter in a one-ton dually, his learning-experience stumbles through other trucks and growing "as bad as an accountant" with a focus on costs, revenue and profit per-trip to keep a guiding hand on the business.
"You've got to know what your costs are, and I do that for absolutely every trip I do," he said. "Every trip." Diligence in tracking costs enabled some of the big early shifts in his approach to equipment. After bad experiences with a variety of used trucks -- then with a newer yet no-less-problematic glider -- he changed tack and began purchasing new with factory-extended warranties, realizing full well the costs not just of repairs, but also of accompanying downtime. And cost diligence doesn't of course have to occur via any particularly sophisticated-looking or even very complicated system.
Schmidt laughed heartily this morning when I asked him to send me a picture of one of the sheets of paper on which he records trip expenses. He was a mere 200 miles into his maiden voyage in a brand-new Volvo VNL 860 he finally took delivery of and got set up for the road, and only had a blank he'd sketched out in preparation for the first trip, hence the laughter, likewise the simple nature of day-to-day accounting. It doesn't take a whizbang computer spreadsheet setup to get this task done the old-school way, he noted.
His end-of-year profit-and-loss statement for 2022 showed the above-average results of all of it, even with massive cost inflation and an ungodly-looking fuel bill for year.