Fulmer, Montgomery, and a growing list of names you probably recognized when they went Chapter 11. You saw those headlines and felt it in your gut, because you’re living the same reality they couldn’t outrun.
Rates are stuck. Insurance keeps climbing. Fuel swings wildly. Maintenance bills pile up. Every month, you’re crunching numbers and hoping they hold together. The problem isn’t that you’re running your operation wrong. The problem is that the trucking market has fundamentally changed, and the old way of doing things is nowhere near sufficient.
You can’t wait for things to get better. Plenty of solid operators already tried that. Whether you’re running 100 trucks or brokering $120 million in freight, you need a new paradigm.
The Cost Crisis in Trucking
You already know what’s happening because you see it on every invoice, every payroll cycle, every renewal notice. Costs keep climbing while the freight market sits there like a stubborn mule.
Equipment Payments Are Eating Your Lunch
According to ATRI’s 2025 report, truck and trailer payments hit 39 cents per mile in 2024, up 8.3% from the year before. That’s a record, and it stings worse when you remember equipment prices jumped over 50% since 2019. You bought or leased those trucks when rates looked promising. Now you’re locked into payments built for a market that doesn’t exist anymore. The latest tariffs also slapped 25% duties on heavy trucks, so anyone shopping for new equipment gets to enjoy even worse math in the future.
Driver Costs Keep Rising Because They Have To
Driver benefits alone climbed to nearly 20 cents per mile, up 4.8% year over year. The shortage sitting above 60,000 drivers means you’re competing for talent you can’t afford to lose. Sign-on bonuses, better schedules, higher base pay — you’re throwing everything at retention because finding replacements costs more than keeping who you have. Long-haul positions turn over fastest, and every empty seat is revenue you’re not making while still paying for the truck.
Insurance Premiums Decided to Go Rogue
Premiums jumped 5.8% in early 2025, continuing a climb that started in 2019 and shows no signs of slowing. Cargo theft surged along the border and major lanes, so insurers tacked on security premiums. Coverage for cross-border ops? Prepare to wince. Your claims history might be clean, but you’re paying for an industrywide problem you can’t control.
Freight Rates Refused to Show Up
Truckload margins crashed to -2.3%. Read that again — negative margins. Capacity flooded the market while freight volumes stayed flat, approaching Q4 despite the usual seasonal bump. Retailers front-loaded inventory earlier in the year to dodge tariff deadlines, which killed fall demand. Spot rates stayed depressed, especially across the Southeast, where trucks outnumber loads. You’re running freight that barely covers fuel, let alone everything else.
Overhead Cuts Only Buy You Time
Fleets shed 7% of back-office staff and trimmed capacity by 2.2% to stay liquid. Selling underutilized assets, leaning on software for fuel and maintenance tracking helps, sure. But it doesn’t solve the core problem. Your average cost per mile sits at $2.26 total, but strip out fuel and you’re at $1.78, the highest non-fuel cost ever recorded. The market pays less while everything costs more.
Fundamentals for Survival
Complaining about the market feels good for about 10 seconds. After that, you need a plan. You can’t control diesel prices or what brokers want to pay, but you can control how your operation runs. Start there.
Split Your Costs Into What You Can and Can’t Control
Every load you haul has two types of costs.
Noncontrollable costs are the ones you’re stuck with: equipment payments at 39 cents per mile, insurance premiums climbing 5.8% annually, fuel hovering around $3.75 per gallon, and driver wages you can’t cut without losing your team. You negotiate these maybe once a year, sign the contract, and eat whatever number lands.
Controllable costs live in your operations and back office and quietly destroy your profitability. Think deadhead miles you could’ve avoided with better load planning, dispatchers manually building routes when software does it in seconds, manual processes that eat hours, and redundant staff positions.
Track cost per load and separate the two buckets. When a $1,200 load costs you $1,250 to run, find the $50 gap. If $35 comes from empty miles, inefficient routing, and back-office bloat, you just identified money sitting on the table. Attack controllable costs first because they respond faster than begging for rate increases.
Four Pillars of Cost Reduction and Efficiency
Cutting costs sounds simple until you’re staring at a dozen places to start and no clear winner. Focus on four areas that move the needle fastest and compound over time.
- Maximize Asset Utilization: Empty miles, idle trucks, and wasted driver hours kill your margins one shift at a time. Tighten routing, cut deadhead, reduce dwell time at docks, and track utilization per truck so you know which assets earn their keep and which ones bleed cash.
- Streamline and Automate Back Office: Manual invoicing, data entry, and duplicate systems cost you staff hours and create errors that delay payments. Automate billing and collections, consolidate your tech stack, and let software handle repetitive work so your team focuses on problems that actually need a human.
- Implement Real-Time Business Intelligence: Monthly reports tell you what went wrong weeks after you could have fixed it. Daily dashboards showing margin per load, cost per mile, and lane profitability let you kill bad freight and double down on what works before you waste another week guessing.
- Adopt Best Practices and Drive Productivity: Other carriers of your size run profitable operations right now, which means the blueprint exists. Benchmark against top performers, train your staff on efficiency, invest in tech with fast ROI, and cut roles that don’t directly drive revenue or reduce costs.
Practical Steps and Best Practices
So with that said, you need moves that work tomorrow, not six months from now after a consultant finishes their deck. Focus on automations that free up time, technology that connects the dots, and data that shows you problems while you can still fix them.
Automation Takes the Grunt Work Off Your Plate
Someone on your team retyped the same load three times today because your inbox doesn’t talk to your TMS. Automation can fix this.
Email parsers pull orders straight into your system and auto-assign them based on lane and carrier score, which means your dispatcher handles exceptions instead of data entry. Invoices generate when delivery docs arrive, driver pay calculates itself, and exception alerts flag problems before customers notice. Compliance checks block sketchy carriers automatically, factoring syncs without manual uploads.
Before you know it, your team has time to solve real problems instead of shuffling paper.
Technology Connects What Used to Be Separate
Dispatch needs one screen showing every truck, every load, and every problem. ELD integration feeds live location, so your team stops calling drivers for updates. Real-time visibility cuts detention because you spot delays early and reroute before drivers sit idle. Back-office automation turns billing from a weeklong slog into same-day execution through document capture, invoice matching, and API connections to factoring platforms. When dispatch and finance share live data, billing disputes drop, and cash shows up faster.
Real-Time Data Tells You What Matters, While You Can Fix It
Monthly reports are autopsies. You read them, see what died, and move on. Real-time dashboards show margin per lane, on-time percentages, unbilled loads, and dwell time right now, while you can still do something about it. You kill lanes bleeding cash, drop customers wrecking your margins, and chase profitable freight based on today’s numbers instead of last month’s guesses. Waiting 30 days to learn you lost money means you lost money for 30 days.
How EKA Solutions Can Help
You need technology that works fast and a partner who understands freight operations, not a vendor who drops software and disappears. EKA Solutions built a platform around what carriers and brokers deal with every day in the trucking market — tight margins, chaotic workflows, and cash that moves too slowly.
- Partner Who Stays, Not Just a Platform You Buy: White-glove onboarding, custom feature builds, and ongoing freight strategy guidance mean you get a relationship that evolves with your operation. EKA monitors your workflows, ships sprint-style improvements tied to your KPIs, and adjusts as the market shifts.
- Automation That Runs Quote to Cash: Load life cycle automation handles status updates, document-to-invoice conversion, and carrier booking, so your team jumps in only for exceptions. Embedded AI agents optimize dispatch and pricing, while risk guardrails block noncompliant carriers before they touch your freight.
- Real-Time Intelligence That Drives Decisions: Margin tracking by load, lane, and customer shows profitability before you commit capacity. Exception alerts flag missed docs, late arrivals, and detention creep while you can still fix them. Carrier scorecards, routing suggestions, and actionable intelligence guide daily decisions instead of monthly guesses.
- One System for Everything: Dispatch, accounting, compliance, and reporting live in a single cloud platform with 99.9% uptime and role-based dashboards. ELD integration feeds predictive ETAs straight into workflows, turning tracking into proactive service instead of reactive damage control.
- Go Live in Weeks, Not Quarters: Fast implementation matters when cash is tight and patience is shorter. EKA’s platform goes live in two to eight weeks, so you capture ROI while competitors are still shopping for solutions.
The New Paradigm: Adapt or Disappear
Montgomery, Fulmer, and the rest didn’t fail because they ran bad operations. They failed because they kept using strategies written for a trucking market that no longer exists. Waiting for freight rates to recover while costs climb is a bet you can’t afford to lose.
Old cycles don’t apply anymore. Cost structures built for 2019 don’t survive 2025. You need to rethink how you price freight, utilize assets, and manage operations from scratch. Cut controllable costs until nothing’s left to trim. Automate everything repetitive. Track margin in real time. Use data that shows problems today, not last month.
EKA gives you the platform and the partnership to pull it off fast. You can keep doing things the way you always have and hope something changes, or you can change first.
Contact us today and start building an operation that survives what comes next.