Trucking with authority, take two: Another run at independence for owner-operator Matthew Karr

"Strike when the market's cold" -- you could consider it a maxim on small business for Overdrive May Trucker of the Month Matthew Karr, coming off an excellent profit year hauling fuel leased to Quality Transportation out of Halltown, Missouri: 

Overdrive Radio sponsor For this edition of Overdrive Radio, Karr details his decision-making around timing his move back to trucking with his own authority. With freight markets cooled relative to the last couple of years, now's an ideal time, he feels, to go back out on his own to do things entirely his way, keeping a past small-fleet failure high in his mind. During the height of the COVID market, when Karr sold most of his small fleet equipment at a premium and went back to leasing, a friend was "wanting to buy a truck" and get in on the spot freight boom, "when the market was stupid," Karr said in our profile of his business two weeks back. -- stupid high, that is, for equipment.

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 "Luckily, he listened to me" and didn't do it, said Karr. "I said, 'Robert, I've been through these ups and downs and swings for 25 years. If you want to buy a truck and you want to get started [as an owner-operator] do it when times are bad.' Now, things have slowed down a little bit, interest rates are going up. ... If you can make it in slow times, you will really flourish" when business cycles turn upward. Karr's banking on the wisdom in the maxim with his new venture, working direct with fuel wholesalers. Hear much more in the podcast about Karr's history of ups and downs and his recent success, including views from his wife, Koren, who nominated the owner in Overdrive's Trucker of the Year award program for 2023: 

Nominations for Overdrive's