You can’t control what the gauge costs to fill. You can control how ready you are when it moves.

In Part 1, we went through who feels it when diesel jumps around: the 3PL, the driver, the receiver, the end user. Short version: everybody.

So what do you do about it?

Honestly, there’s no single answer. Some people in this business want every detail signed and filed. Others still run on a phone call and a handshake. Both get freight moved. Getting through a rough fuel market usually has less to do with the paperwork than with how people think about it.

Focus on what you can control. The price at the pump isn’t on that list. Jim Horrigan, an expert partner at Bain & Company, told Sourcing Journal that the smart move is to stop waiting for prices to settle and focus on “the controllable expenses within freight.” What that looks like depends on your operation. For one shipper it’s timing. For another it’s lanes, or volume, or who they work with.

Expect the swing. Fuel that drops this month can climb again next month. The people who handle it best assume prices will move and leave themselves some room, whether that’s in a budget, a schedule, or a conversation they had early.

Talk sooner. Most fuel headaches start out as surprises. A heads-up that a load might run high, or that a pickup could move a day, goes a long way, whichever side of the deal you’re on.

Remember who’s absorbing it. Most trucking companies are small businesses. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association points out that its members work load to load and “can’t simply raise their rates when fuel spikes.” When the people hauling your freight can’t stay in business, everyone has less capacity.

Play the long game. Fuel markets settle down eventually. Business relationships outlast any price spike, and the ones that held up when diesel was ugly tend to be the ones people count on when it isn’t.

Diesel’s going to keep doing what diesel does. How ready you are when it moves is the part you get to decide.

The post Diesel’s Up, Down, and Sideways: Part 2 appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Fuel prices used to be a lot simpler. These days diesel moves every week, and everyone on the supply chain feels it.

So you’ve noticed diesel. Hard not to. Back in January the national average was around $3.46 a gallon. By late September it hit $6.53, the highest weekly number the U.S. Energy Information Administration has on record. It’s eased a little since, but it’s still sitting around $6.35, and it moves enough week to week that nobody’s getting comfortable.

Here’s how that rolls downhill.

The 3PL. If you’re the one arranging freight, your quotes now have the shelf life that’s about something less than of a carton of milk. Fuel surcharges reset every week off the DOE index, so the rate you gave a shipper Monday may not hold by Friday.

The spot market is even messier. Dean Croke, principal industry analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, put it plainly: “Rates usually take three to four weeks to catch up with rising diesel prices.” Until they do, the carrier is the one paying for the fuel.

The driver and owner-operator. This is where it really stings. Fuel is already an owner-operator’s biggest expense, and a flatbed hauling heavy or oversize freight isn’t exactly sipping it. Surcharges help, but they’re pegged to a national average and they lag the pump. Fuel up in a high-price region and you eat the difference. Some small carriers are seriously thinking about hanging it up.

The receiver. Higher freight cost shows up on the invoice, plain and simple. It shows up in scheduling too. Fewer available trucks means fewer options and less wiggle room on delivery windows, so planning ahead matters more than usual.

The end user. Eventually it lands on everybody, because just about everything rode on a truck at some point. Steel, lumber, machinery, groceries. All of it.

Any good news? Some. The EIA’s latest outlook has retail diesel averaging around $4.49 a gallon in 2027. That’s better, not cheap, and forecasts have missed plenty this year, so don’t bet the farm on it.

So that’s who’s feeling it. The better question is what to do about it. In Part 2, coming soon, we’ll get into the practical side: how to plan around fuel surcharges, when to lock in capacity, and how to keep a fluctuating diesel market from turning every load into a guessing game.

The post Diesel’s Up, Down, and Sideways: Part 1 appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Cori joins Chris Jolly on Freight Coach, Episode 1543, to talk heavy haul, oversized freight, and doing the right thing.

Cori Eckley-Ritchards, now NATCO Transport’s VP, had originally planned to leave the family business. She was finishing grad school, working for her dad in the meantime, and looking for a job elsewhere. Then her father died unexpectedly, and she stayed to help her mom, who owned an asset-based truck line.

“Fast forward 23 years, I’m still here,” she told host Chris Jolly on his recent Freight Coach podcast. “So, I didn’t go very far.” She calls that detour “a blessing in disguise.”

“If It Fits in a Box, I Don’t Know What to Do With It”
Cori is fourth-generation transportation, raised on the flatbed and heavy haul mentality. It shows. “There’s a running joke in my office,” she says. “If it fits in a box or it fits in a dry van, I don’t know what to do with it.”

Hand her something wide, tall, or strange, though, and she lights up. “If you give me something 14-foot wide, obscure, tall, all the constraints and challenges, I’m on it. I love it.”

Shippers Are Asking Harder Questions
Cori and Chris spend much of the conversation on the pressure facing brokers, from court cases like Montgomery (see how we covered it in The Middle of the Road Just Got Narrower) to fly-by-night operators who make honest ones look bad. Both are TIA members, and they talk about why that logo matters to shippers.

Customers have noticed the risk, and they are vetting. “In my 23 years, I’ve never been asked that question until recently,” Cori says. Trucking has become dinnertime conversation.

She sees an opening for smaller, more hands-on shops. Shippers may stop choosing a broker because it has “2,000 people working for them,” and Cori hopes they do. “I hope that mentality goes out the door.”

How NATCO Answers
Her answer starts with technology, then leans on repeat carriers and drivers who know the work. “We’re familiar with them, so we’re not questioning what kind of service we’re going to get.” Some carriers call before NATCO has posted the details: “Hey, do you have any information yet? Where do I need to be?”

Transparency is the other half. “See something, hear something, say something is our rule of thumb.” You can see how that plays out on our trucking network page.

The Truth Beats the Fast Truck
Cori would rather deliver an honest update than a hopeful one. “I would rather tell a customer that we’re still working on an order that’s complicated, oversized, whatever the constraints are, versus saying I have a truck and be crossing my fingers.”

She sells the way she likes to be sold, aiming for “more of a consultant type relationship versus quickest, fastest truck, cheapest truck.”

One story sums it up. Years into her business, Cori spotted a customer’s name on a stranger’s shirt at dinner. She introduced herself as a vendor, and the man looked at her and said, “Oh my gosh, you’re Natco.” Her name and her company’s had become one and the same.

Watch the Full Conversation
Catch the entire Freight Coach episode:

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify

The post Fourth-Generation Freight, and a Broker Who Won’t Cross Her Fingers appeared first on NATCO Transport.

One needle, one number, no history. This is what “checking your data” used to mean.

Ask five people in trucking what “telematics” means and you might get five different answers.

At its simplest, a telematics device is just hardware on a truck (GPS, an ELD, sometimes a camera) that captures data and sends it to a platform. No mystery, no black box. Just a truck reporting on itself in real time.

What fleets do with that data is where things get interesting. A new report from the American Transportation Research Institute, From Data to Decisions: Trucking’s Use of Telematics Data to Improve Performance, surveyed more than 100 motor carriers and turned up something worth flagging for anyone shipping flatbed or oversize freight:

Safety metrics like speeding and critical events are tracked by more than 90 percent of fleets, but the metrics tied directly to cost — things like preventative maintenance scheduling and cost per mile — lag well behind. Nearly half of carriers still don’t connect their telematics data to maintenance software at all, even though ATRI ranks those exact metrics among the industry’s highest-value, most underused opportunities.

That gap is exactly where a 3PL earns its keep. NATCO doesn’t own the trucks producing this data, but we live inside it every day. When we vet a carrier for an oversize or heavy haul load, we’re weighing the same signals this report highlights: safety history, equipment reliability, on-time performance.

That’s how we match freight to carriers who can actually deliver it intact and on schedule, not just whichever truck is available first.

Telematics turns a truck into a source of decisions, not just a location on a map. Our job is knowing which of those decisions actually move your freight forward.

Read the full ATRI report at TruckingResearch.org, and see the scope of our vetted carriers moving your freight on NATCO’s trucking network.

The post Telematics, Decoded appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Every shelf in this aisle got stocked by a truck. Some of them more than once a week.

Open the refrigerator. Almost every item inside — the milk, the produce, the packaged goods — made its way to the store on a truck. Before that, the ingredients that became those products also moved by truck, often several times over, from farm to processor to distributor to shelf. Take trucking out of the picture and the shelves empty out within days. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s how tightly the food supply chain depends on trucking.

An industry that measures itself in billions of tons
The scale is hard to overstate. In 2024, commercial trucks generated an estimated $906 billion in gross freight revenue and hauled 11.27 billion tons of freight, roughly 72.7% of everything shipped domestically by weight, according to the American Trucking Associations. Nearly 15 million trucks are registered to do that work, and the fleet logs almost 330 billion miles a year getting it done.

Trucking doesn’t stop at the border, either. It carried 67% of the value of U.S.-Canada surface trade and 85% of U.S.-Mexico trade in 2024, tying North American supply chains together, one load at a time.

Millions of jobs, most of them at small companies
The freight itself is only part of the story. Trucking employs 8.4 million people across the economy, including 3.58 million drivers, and that’s before counting the mechanics, dispatchers, warehouse staff, and freight brokers whose jobs exist because trucks need to move. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics tracks these employment trends across the broader transportation and warehousing sector, and trucking consistently accounts for a large share of it.

Contrary to the image of a handful of national mega-carriers, most of this employment sits with small operators. Almost 580,000 motor carriers are registered with the FMCSA, and 91.5% of them run 10 trucks or fewer. Trucking is, in large part, a small business industry, one where a single owner-operator’s paycheck depends on the same load-by-load economics as a major carrier’s.

As Drivewyze’s introductory guide to the industry describes it, that’s also how carriers get classified in the first place: by whether they haul their own goods or someone else’s, by the size of the load, and by the type of truck involved. Truckload, less-than-truckload, private fleet, for-hire: the distinctions sound technical, but they describe real differences in how a shipment gets from a farm or factory to a store shelf.

Essential, and exposed
None of this happens in a vacuum. As Investopedia puts it, the transportation sector is “central to the economy,” though its stability rises and falls with fuel prices, labor costs, regulatory shifts, and events far outside any one company’s control. A spike in diesel prices, a driver shortage, or a new emissions rule can ripple through freight rates and, eventually, through the price of groceries.

Drivers feel that exposure directly. Turnover at large fleets topped 50% in 2022, insurance premiums have climbed sharply, and carriers are under real pressure to invest in safety and efficiency just to stay competitive. The industry that keeps the country fed and stocked runs on thin margins and a workforce that’s harder to hold onto every year.

Why it matters at the kitchen table
Strip away the tonnage figures and freight bills, and the point is simple. Someone drove a truck so the bread, the produce, the medicine, and the everyday goods a household depends on would be there when needed. Trucking isn’t background infrastructure, it’s the reason “putting food on the table” is still possible at the scale a modern economy requires. Understanding the industry, its size, its fragility, and the people who keep it running, is a start toward appreciating just how much rides on every load.

The post Somewhere on the Road, a Truck is Bringing You Dinner appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The Transport Intermediaries Association (TIA) Policy Forum is important to me as a transportation brokerage owner for several reasons. The event gives me a platform to work alongside other like-minded business owners, an opportunity to meet and educate lawmakers about issues directly affecting my business, and a way to build awareness for how our industry actually operates.

TIA Policy Forum: Advocacy and Perspective

Over the years, while attending the TIA Annual Conference, I heard about the Policy Forum from other members. I knew it was focused on advocating for the transportation brokerage industry, but I was unsure how I’d be able to contribute to this type of event.

The term “Policy Forum” was intimidating to me, since it involved government and elected officials. Several of my mentors encouraged me to attend, as it was a chance to educate members of congress about the 3PL industry. My first Policy Forum in 2016 was an eye-opening experience as a business owner. Approximately 40 people attended that year. The TIA staff and seasoned members were extremely helpful while I learned to navigate the event. The Government Affairs staff scheduled 60+ appointments with congressional offices. Everything was well organized, and we were given key speaking points ahead of time. Information packets compiled by the Government Affairs team helped us walk in prepared. This gave me the confidence to speak with lawmakers and their staff about the needs of our industry.

I’ve continued attending the Policy Forum for the past 10 years now. It’s one of my favorite industry events each year. With help from TIA staff and prior attendees, the group keeps growing. Last year we had one of our largest turnouts yet. My business is based in Arlington, Texas, and I’m a proud member of “Team Texas.” Many owners and executives travel in from Texas each year, so we always have a strong contingent representing TIA. We spend time comparing notes on our businesses, working through how government regulations shape our day-to-day operations.

I look forward to working with other Texas members because this event gives us a real chance to network. I consider everyone I’ve met and worked with at Policy Forum both mentors and friends. We know each other on a professional level, but a personal one too. A key takeaway from my experience with TIA events: people are genuinely helpful and willing to assist. The one-on-one conversations I’ve had with other members have helped me over the years in ways I didn’t expect.

Advocating for your business and the industry as a whole matters. Given the constantly shifting regulatory landscape, business owners carry a high level of risk and liability. The Policy Forum is an active way to advocate on your own behalf. When we meet with congressional offices, they already know the TIA name, credit to the ongoing work of the Government Affairs team. In several of my meetings last year, the representative or staff member knew the Government Affairs contact by name. Participating in the Forum lets us reiterate the challenges our industry faces, with real-life examples and data behind them. We leave an information packet with each office, laying out the size and scope of the workforce within the transportation brokerage industry. TIA also encourages members to host a Policy Forum style meeting at their own business, inviting their local representative to see operations firsthand. Advocacy isn’t a once-a-year exercise, it’s an ongoing effort.

The Policy Forum is a rewarding, impactful event, and I encourage every TIA member to take part. I highly recommend attending this year to represent your business. Now more than ever, we need to work together to raise awareness for this industry.

The post Why the TIA Policy Forum Matters appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The Many Directions of Transportation

In logistics, things rarely go exactly as planned.  NATCO Transport’s three decades of experience is based not just in moving freight, but in adapting when challenges pop up.

Whether it’s a hurricane disrupting shipping routes or a sudden surge in seasonal demand catching retailers off-guard, NATCO’s network of qualified carriers means we can scale quickly when it matters most.

When natural disasters hit and traditional routes shut down, disaster recovery requires quick thinking and creative problem-solving. NATCO’s team excels at finding equipment and alternative routes while navigating regulatory hurdles in real-time.

Then there are the seasonal rushes that happen every year but still challenge supply chains. Halloween candy shipments and the Christmas retail wave often produce capacity crunches that can overwhelm unprepared operations. NATCO’s approach? Planning ahead and lining up the right carriers before demand spikes. From flatbeds to temperature-controlled trucks, dry vans to specialized heavy haul: we match your needs with the right equipment so that seasonal inventory reaches warehouses before shoppers start demanding it.

What makes NATCO different isn’t just our range of services or our reputation from handling tens of thousands of shipments. It’s our commitment to clear communication and personalized service when the pressure’s on. When your supply chain hits a bump—whether it comes from Mother Nature or Black Friday crowds—you need a 3PL partner that can think creatively and deliver results.

Since 1992, NATCO has demonstrated that real versatility in logistics isn’t about having every answer ready to go. It’s about having the experience, the connections, and the problem-solving approach to find solutions when the usual methods won’t work. It’s often all about flexibility. And that’s NATCO.

The post When Supply Chains Need to Pivot appeared first on NATCO Transport.

NATCO VP Cori Eckley-Ritchards

As the trucking industry explores autonomous vehicle technology, one innovation stands out for what it reveals about the irreplaceable value of human drivers: External Human-Machine Interfaces, or eHMIs.

These visual communication systems — typically light displays mounted on autonomous vehicles — are trying to replicate something our professional truck drivers do naturally every single day.

When our experienced NATCO drivers roll up to an intersection, they catch a pedestrian’s eye. They give a friendly wave to let someone cross. They flash their lights to help out a fellow trucker. These quick, human moments help to keep our roads safe and everyone moving.

eHMIs show us that the tech world has figured out something important: autonomous vehicles have a real problem on their hands. How do you replace decades of human judgment, road courtesy, and just knowing what to do? These systems use colored lights, symbols, and patterns to tell others what the vehicle plans to do.

Research shows that cyan-colored, flashing displays work best, but here’s the rub: while human error does cause accidents, even the fanciest eHMI can’t match the adaptability of a well-trained driver who’s learned from experience. Our professional drivers combine their hard-earned skills with modern safety technology to make better decisions than either humans or machines could make alone.

Here at NATCO, we see this technology development as proof of what we’ve always known: our drivers bring something to the road that you just can’t quantify through an algorithm. Not yet, anyway.

While we’re all for innovations that make things safer and more efficient — from collision avoidance systems to smarter route planning — technology today does seem to work best when it helps our drivers shine, not when it tries to replace them.

The whole eHMI story tells us something worth remembering: the autonomous vehicle folks are working overtime to artificially recreate what our professional drivers bring naturally. As we look ahead, NATCO stays committed to investing in both smart technology and the skilled professionals who remain the backbone of safe, reliable transportation.

Our drivers aren’t just steering wheels — they’re the gold standard that technology is still trying to reach.

The post The Human Touch in Autonomous Technology appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Truck driving can also provide a path toward stability.

Deep inside this year’s annual report, “Evolving Truck Driver Demographics: Issues and Opportunities,” from The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), there’s an extraordinary section on foster care and trucking.

ATRI’s definition: “Foster care provides temporary, court-monitored placements for youth when their home environments are unsafe, with kinship care being the preferred option. When family placement is not possible, children may live with non-relative caregivers or specialized services, and/or in congregate care settings.”

The numbers:

• 73.2 million children in the United States in 2022.

• About 1 in 128 (0.8%) were served by foster care at some point during the year.

• West Virginia (3.3%), Alaska (2.2%), and Montana (1.9%) have the highest shares of children in foster care.

• New Jersey (0.2%), Utah, Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland (0.4%) have the lowest.

Youth in foster care tend to have a lower high school graduation rates (56%) than the national average (86%), and ATRI’s connection is that housing instability and education are factors affecting a stable future.

Along come national, state, and local programs to help move foster care youth in a positive, more stable direction. Big Brothers Big Sisters has a mentorship program. Foster Care to Success has career counseling, internships, and scholarships.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act ensures those with housing instability have access to essential services and education. This legislation is one way that the trucking industry is able to reach foster youth and connect them to the possibilities of stability and income. It does so in part through programs like the Foster Care Transition Toolkit.

ATRI words the scenario respectfully and straightforwardly:

“As a society, including the trucking industry, it is important to recognize that foster youth should not be defined by their past experiences. The proper support can help ensure that they surmount any barriers to becoming reliable, motivated, and hardworking employees. By focusing on targeted outreach, inclusive hiring practices, mentorship, and career development opportunities, the industry can help break down stigma and leverage the strengths that foster youth bring to the workforce.”

Transitioning into adulthood is challenging enough, and those with housing stability have an extra set of challenges. Kudos to those in the trucking industry who provide them with an opportunity to go on a career path that can help with stability and a promising future.

The post Foster Care and Trucking appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) issued a report this summer: “Evolving Truck Driver Demographics: Issues and Opportunities.” It’s a goldmine of information about our nation’s truck drivers.

About halfway through the document, ATRI presents this table and discussion:

ATRI: Summary Statistics for Top Transportation Occupations

There’s much to unpack here. First, the caveats: The chart is not exclusively for tractor trailer drivers, and that $1,005 median weekly earnings for drivers doesn’t factor in any bonuses. (ATA’s driver compensation study lists that average at $1,470 per week. or some $76,420 per year). Still, we can see that the driver average is, in fact, average when held up with the entire U.S. labor force.

ATRI groups these top five transportation sector occupations to show a scope of industry numbers and then, cleverly, the study pivots into how the industry might effectively confront its perpetual driver shortage.

Which explains the title of that section: “Opportunity: Recruit Younger Employees from other Transportation Occupations.” As they describe the situation:

From which pool do you recruit talent?

“Driver/sales workers and truck driver not only have higher average ages but also higher median weekly earnings than other occupational groups … Consequently, motor carriers (and other transportation companies) may possess a pool of younger talent that is well-positioned to transition into truck driving roles (those with average ages in the upper 30s). Individuals in these positions may already be familiar with the requirements, lifestyle, and expectations associated with truck driving. This presents an opportunity for fleets to leverage their existing non-driving workforce to internally recruit and develop younger drivers.”

Here’s the rub. ATRI’s very next section in the study is “Issue: Declines in Teen Licensing May Impact Younger Adult CDL Applicants.”

Yep. It seems the percentage for those who are eligible to have driver licenses (16 years or older) and don’t is remarkably high. New York: 25%. West Virginia: 24%. Texas: 21%. Hawaii: 21%. Oklahoma: 20%. (All of these percentages are from 2023.) The national average of those without driver licenses was 14%.

So, some people need rides. Uber and Lyft are probably not complaining.

This presents yet another challenge for expanding a commercial driver pool that’s increasingly aging out. ATRI has a solid idea here: Pull from those potential drivers already involved in the transportation industry through aligned jobs. Yes. Start with what you know.

The post The Transportation Jobs appeared first on NATCO Transport.