Owner-operators can master work-life balance in trucking

In today’s Overdrive Radio edition, catch points of view on the absolute necessity of work-life balance for your personal sanity, and for the success of your business. That balance can be particularly elusive for independent owner-operators, as Silver Creek Transportation owner Jason Cowan well knows — he spent much of his early career in those shoes with just a single truck himself, and in some ways balance might be hardest for you who fit that bill.

In this edition, we’ll walk through a variety of strategies to achieve the goal of healthy success. The podcast features the bulk of the late-May webcast presentation and discussion Overdrive hosted with Cowan, our big 2021 Small Fleet Champ winner, and Adam Wingfield, who’s head of the Innovative Logistics Group consultancy, also a past independent owner-operator himself.

Overdrive Radio sponsor Howes wants to hear from you. If you’ve used Howes’ fuel treatments, lubricants or other products through the years, send me an an email or leave a voicemail with your story on the podcast message line. Leave your name and address and we’ll get a prize pack with Howes’ Diesel Defender treatment and Multipurpose penetrating oil to your doorstep: 615-852-8530.Though home time and other personal-life concerns play a large part, work-life balance isn’t all about those things — in part of the Q&A at the end of the live webcast, which was sponsored by the Bestpass company, Wingfield responded to a question about how to cope with the stress a down market puts on everyone. Direct that stress toward the right spot, he advised, invoking the calls to protest that have accompanied falling rates in the spot market. “One thing you can protest is how you’re running your business,” he said, to look closely at it to make sure you’re utilizing the right “day-to-day policies and processes” for maximum effectiveness and efficiency. 

Subscribe to the podcast on your listening platform of choice for early access to the weekly Overdrive Radio series — it drops typically every Friday to the feed and follows here at OverdriveOnline.com and in Overdrive‘s Youtube and Facebook feeds the following week. You can subscribe via Apple and Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, most anywhere you listen.There’s plenty more from Wingfield on that score. And small fleet owner Cowan, throughout, offers perspective on ways to build business with driver employees and owner-operator contractors in mind. He mentioned the difficulties so many have attracting younger folks willing to stay in trucking as drivers. All trucking companies — from those who pay the most to those who pay the least — seem to need drivers 24/7/365. “Maybe this is not a money thing,” he said of fleets’ effort to keep the best among operators. While getting drivers home more often and/or on regular timetables is part of his mission as Silver Creek Transportation owner, that’s certainly not all there is to it.

Find the full video of the webcast above, or listen via the players below. 

You can register and watch the webinar on-demand via this link, too. Find Adam Wingfield via the Innovative Logistics Group’s website. Jason Cowan’s Silver Creek Transportation website is here.