The one question to ask before any tech investment

Is efficient routing and reducing deadheading more important today than in the past? Why or why not?

More important, and it's not close. In the past, you could bury an empty mile in a fat rate. Those days are gone. Freight rates are tighter, fuel isn't getting cheaper, drivers are scarce and expensive and shippers now expect Amazon-grade visibility on a trucking budget. Every deadhead mile is a mile you pay for twice—once in fuel and wages, once in the load you didn't haul.

And there's a second bill coming: emissions. Regulators and large shippers are starting to score carriers on carbon per load, and an empty truck is pure carbon with zero revenue attached. So it's not that routing got harder—it's that the margin for waste disappeared. Efficiency used to be a nice-to-have. Now it's the business model.

What is one method small trucking carriers can use to decrease empty miles?

Stop planning loads one at a time. The single highest-leverage move is thinking in round trips instead of one-way hauls—building your lanes so that every delivery is already pointed at your next pickup before the truck rolls.

Most small carriers book the outbound, then scramble to fill the backhaul once the driver is already empty and 400 miles from home. Flip it. Commit to lanes and partners where a return load is designed in, not hoped for. You don't need a fancy algorithm to start—you need the discipline to stop treating the return trip as an afterthought. The technology just makes that discipline scalable.

Many small trucking fleets have limited budgets and resources for adopting new technology. How would you advise them to evaluate which tech investments are worthwhile?

Ignore the feature list. Ask one question: does this put money back in the truck, and how fast? If a vendor can't tie their product to a number you actually feel—miles saved, hours of admin killed, invoices paid quicker, a load you'd otherwise have missed—it's a toy, not an investment. My rule of thumb: if it doesn't pay for itself inside a quarter or two, it's not urgent.

And be honest about the hidden cost, which is never the license fee—it's the time to implement and the pain of getting your team to actually use it. A cheap tool nobody adopts is the most expensive thing you'll ever buy. Start with the one bottleneck that keeps you up at night, fix that, then move to the next. You don't need a tech strategy. You need to stop the biggest leak.

What is the biggest benefit for a small motor carrier of having a TMS instead of relying on disparate systems or spreadsheets?

One source of truth. With spreadsheets and a dozen apps, your business only exists in the heads of two or three people—and every answer requires a phone call. That doesn't scale, and it breaks the day someone's sick or quits. A TMS turns your operation into a system instead of a memory. Dispatch, rates, documents, invoicing and status all live in one place, updated once, visible to everyone.

The immediate win people notice is time—no more re-keying the same load into five screens. But the real prize is that you can finally grow without hiring a person for every extra truck. Spreadsheets don't scale. Systems do. That's the whole difference between a fleet that's busy and a fleet that's building something.

Do small fleets typically have limited data, and does that hinder their ability to automate more of their operations?

Here's the uncomfortable truth: small fleets aren't short on data—they're drowning in it. It's just trapped in inboxes, text messages, paper BOLs and someone's memory. The problem was never the amount of data; it was that none of it was captured in a usable form. And that's actually good news, because it means automation doesn't require some massive data project—it starts the moment you stop letting information evaporate.

Run your operation through one system for even a few months, and you'll have more clean, structured data than you've ever had. Then automation isn't a leap, it's the obvious next step. So no, limited data isn't the real barrier. The barrier is data that never gets written down. Fix the capture, and the automation follows.

In today's supply chain, is it possible for a motor carrier to run a business without technology?

Technically yes. Profitably? For much longer? No. You can still run trucks on phone calls and paper—plenty do—but you're competing against carriers who see their whole operation in real time, quote in minutes, invoice same-day and give shippers the visibility they now demand as table stakes. That's not a fair fight. The shippers are the tell: more of them simply won't tender freight to a carrier that can't provide tracking and clean digital paperwork.

So the question isn't really "can you survive without technology"—it's "how long before the good freight stops calling you?" Technology isn't what makes you a great trucking company; a great operator still wins. But it's fast becoming the price of admission to the table. Show up without it, and you're not in the game.