Owner-ops are not company drivers for a reason – ABC test in practice, rush to get authority, much more data from ATBS

There's a whole lot to chew on in today's edition of Overdrive Radio (embedded above and below for listening), chiefly comprised of a re-air the folks at owner-operator business services firm ATBS were kind enough to allow us to make of President Todd Amen's most recent semi-annual dissection of income and revenue averages, miles and more.

Don't miss an episode: Subscribe to the Overdrive Radio podcast via listening apps like As Max Heine previously reported, the top line is that 2020 on the whole saw owner-operator income make a solid gain, cutting against the best prediction Amen thought he could make at the beginning of 2020 (we all know what happened to nearly all predictions shortly thereafter). For this year's dissection, Amen painted a particularly interesting picture of the numbers from last year, given what he likens to a three-to-five-year macroeconomic cycle squeezed into 12 months.

2020's lackluster beginning turned into an early-pandemic boom in March, the deepest of bottoms in April and May, then roaring back through the rest of the year and continuing to do so today for many. 

[Related: No turning back: New era for direct freight] 

He also detailed possible headwinds particularly for leased owner-operators and their fleet partners in the Biden administration's revival of Obama-era interest in pressure against the independent contractor model for self-employed people in general. Comparing the largest fleets' responses to the question of their level of worry over the independent contractor classification issue during the Trump years and now under Biden, ATBS found the level had doubled: