EOS® for Trucking & Logistics
EOS® for Trucking & Logistics Companies
Trucking runs on pennies: $2.33 a mile in costs, operating margins under 1% for many truckload carriers, and driver turnover that resets the clock on everything. EOS® gives the leadership team a system for the one thing the market can't take away — how well the company is run.
Most carriers and logistics companies are run by operators who can quote their cost per mile to the penny but haven't had a real leadership team meeting in months. Dispatch is a daily firefight, the owner is the escalation path for every breakdown and every angry shipper, and the driver-recruiting treadmill consumes cash that never shows up as a line item. Rate-market swings get blamed for everything — including problems that are actually internal.
The Entrepreneurial Operating System® fits trucking because so little of the business is controllable — which makes it essential to run the controllable part with total discipline. Rates and fuel are the market's call; deadhead, seated-truck percentage, maintenance cost per mile, safety scores, and driver turnover are leadership's. As a Certified EOS Implementer®, Jon Kludt has run 300+ sessions with founder-led leadership teams across a wide range of industries, helping them get one owner on every function and manage by a weekly Scorecard — the discipline that lets a carrier outrun its competitors on execution even when nobody can outrun the freight market.
Sound familiar?
- Driver turnover is treated as a recruiting problem — spend more on ads, pay more sign-on bonuses — when drivers keep leaving over dispatch chaos, unpredictable home time, and broken pay promises.
- The owner is dispatcher-of-last-resort, chief mechanic-whisperer, and the only person key shippers will talk to.
- Nobody owns deadhead percentage end to end, so empty miles quietly run 5–10 points above what the network could support.
- Trucks sit unseated while recruiting and operations blame each other, and every unseated truck bleeds fixed cost daily.
- Maintenance is reactive: breakdowns set the schedule, CSA scores drift, and the shop and dispatch fight about downtime.
- The P&L arrives on the 20th and tells you what went wrong six weeks ago — there's no weekly number that would have warned you.
An example Trucking & Logistics Accountability Chart
In trucking, the classic EOS® chart expands so the people side of the business — driver recruiting, retention, safety, compliance — becomes its own seat rather than an afterthought split between dispatch and HR. Here's a typical chart for a 20–200 truck carrier or asset-light logistics company — seats, not people.
Visionary
- Key shipper and broker relationships
- Culture and core values
- New lanes, new services, growth and acquisition ideas
- Big problem solving
Integrator
- Lead, manage, hold accountable (LMA)
- P&L and business plan execution
- Remove obstacles between sales, ops, safety, and the shop
- Special projects
Sales & Customer Development
- LMA for sales/account managers
- Revenue per truck and freight-mix targets
- Rate negotiations, bids, and contract freight balance
- Customer diversification (no shipper dominates)
- Service metrics communicated to customers
Operations & Dispatch
- LMA for dispatchers and driver managers
- Load planning, utilization, and deadhead %
- On-time pickup/delivery performance
- Fleet maintenance program and cost per mile
- Driver communication and home-time commitments kept
Safety, Recruiting & Compliance
- Driver recruiting pipeline and time-to-seat
- Retention program and driver turnover number
- CSA scores, DOT compliance, and audits
- Orientation, training, and accident review
Finance & Admin
- Accurate, on-time financials and cost per mile by category
- Cash flow, fuel-card and factoring management
- Billing, collections, and detention recovery
- Insurance program and claims management
Seats, not people — one person can hold more than one seat in a growing company. The chart defines the structure the business needs, then you put the right people in the right seats.
Setting your V/TO™ numbers: what healthy looks like
A trucking V/TO™ has to be built on cost-per-mile honesty. The market sets the rate; your 1-year plan sets what it costs you to run a mile and how many revenue miles each truck produces. These benchmarks frame what good looks like.
Operating cost per mile
$2.34/mile average (2025); $1.85 excluding fuel
ATRI's carrier-reported average hit a record $2.336 in 2025. Knowing your own number by category — and which categories are above peers — is the foundation of the whole plan. (ATRI — Operational Costs of Trucking)
Operating ratio / margin
92–95 OR in normal markets; truckload margins ran under 1% in 2025
In the freight recession, average truckload operating margins fell below 1%. A V/TO™ target of a 92–94 OR through the cycle demands top-quartile execution, not just better rates. (ATRI — 2025 Operational Costs Report Findings)
Driver turnover
44% industry average (2025); 70%+ at large truckload fleets, ~32% at small fleets
Small fleets' structural advantage is culture and predictability. Every point of turnover you beat the market by is recruiting spend and orientation cost you keep. (FleetOwner — ATRI 2026 Operational Cost Report)
Deadhead (empty miles)
15–22% for well-run truckload networks
Carriers running above ~28% usually have the fastest available margin improvement in the company — it's a planning and lane-discipline problem, not a market problem. (Datatruck — Deadhead Miles: A Carrier's Guide)
Revenue per truck per year
$150K–$220K dry van; top fleets exceed $250K
The cleanest 3-year-picture number: it rolls rate, utilization, deadhead, and seated-truck discipline into one figure per unit of capital.
A weekly Trucking & Logistics Scorecard that actually predicts
A trucking Scorecard is built from numbers dispatch can influence this week — not the P&L that shows up on the 20th. Each is weekly, owned by one seat, and predictive of next month's operating ratio.
| Measurable | Example target | Why it's on the Scorecard |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue per truck per week | ≥ $3,800–4,500 (set from your lanes) | The single number that rolls rate, utilization, and deadhead together. When it slips, you have weeks of warning before the OR confirms it. |
| Deadhead % | ≤ 15–20% | Empty miles burn fuel, driver hours, and equipment life at full cost and zero revenue. It's the most controllable margin lever in the building. |
| Seated truck % | ≥ 95% | ATRI found fleets averaging 10% of trucks unseated. An unseated truck still makes its insurance and payment — this number keeps recruiting and ops accountable to each other. |
| Driver turnover (rolling annualized) | ≤ 35–45% | Every departure costs thousands in recruiting, orientation, and idle equipment. Weekly visibility forces the exit-reason conversation while it's still fixable. |
| On-time pickup & delivery % | ≥ 97% | Service is the only durable rate justification a small carrier has. Shippers forgive rate increases before they forgive missed appointments. |
| Maintenance cost per mile / trucks down | Trend vs plan; ≤ 2 down > 48 hrs | Repair and maintenance costs rose 8.6% in 2025. A weekly number moves the shop from breakdown-driven to PM-driven before the road calls do it for you. |
| Safety events / CSA trend | 0 preventables; CSA improving | One bad CSA category raises insurance, kills shipper bids, and invites litigation. Safety earns its Scorecard line at the leadership table, not just in orientation. |
| AR > 45 days (incl. detention owed) | ≤ 10% of AR | Fuel is paid weekly; freight is paid in 40+ days. Carriers fail from that gap, and unbilled detention is free margin leaking every week. |
Example quarterly Rocks
Rocks are the 3–7 most important things the company must get done in the next 90 days. Here's what strong Rocks look like for a trucking or logistics leadership team:
- 1Cut deadhead from 24% to 18% by rebuilding the top 10 lanes with paired backhauls
- 2Launch a driver-retention program — 7/30/90-day check-ins, home-time guarantees kept and measured — and cut turnover 15 points
- 3Hire and onboard an operations manager so the owner is out of daily dispatch by week 12
- 4Implement PM compliance tracking and get scheduled maintenance above 90% to cut road breakdowns
- 5Win 2 dedicated/contract accounts to move contract freight above 60% of revenue mix
- 6Build a real cost-per-mile model by truck and lane, and exit or reprice the 5 worst lanes
Free download
Get the Trucking & Logistics EOS® one-pager
The example Accountability Chart, benchmarks, Scorecard measurables, and Rocks from this page — on one branded PDF you can share with your leadership team.
From Jon's desk
Drivers don't quit trucks. They quit chaos.
Ask any carrier and you'll hear the same thing: 'We can't find drivers.' Then look at how the company actually runs, and — honestly — I'd quit too. Dispatch changes plans mid-day without explanation. Home time is a coin flip. Payroll has 'adjustments' nobody can explain. The recruiter promises one job; operations delivers another. The industry calls this a driver shortage. A lot of the time it's a leadership shortage wearing a driver-shortage costume.
The numbers back this up. Industry-average turnover ran about 44% in 2025 — but small fleets held around 32% while big truckload fleets churned over 70%. Same freight market, same driver pool, wildly different outcomes. The variable isn't pay alone. It's whether the company keeps its promises, and promise-keeping is a system, not a personality trait.
Here's the uncomfortable chain: turnover isn't a recruiting problem, it's an operations problem. Deadhead isn't a market problem, it's a planning problem. Unseated trucks aren't a hiring problem, they're an accountability problem between two departments that don't share a number. In trucking, almost every 'industry problem' traces back to a function nobody clearly owns.
That's exactly what EOS® fixes. The Accountability Chart puts one seat on operations — including deadhead and the home-time promises dispatch makes — and one seat on safety, recruiting, and retention, with the turnover number attached to it. Not split across three people. Owned. The weekly Scorecard puts revenue per truck, deadhead, seated-truck percentage, turnover, and on-time service in front of the leadership team every week — numbers dispatch can still influence, not the P&L autopsy that arrives on the 20th.
And the Level 10 Meeting™ gives the shop, dispatch, sales, and safety a forum where the real issues get processed instead of relitigated. Why did we lose three drivers this month — actually why? Which lanes are we running at a loss because we've 'always served that customer'? What would it take to seat those four trucks? Ninety minutes, same time every week, issues solved and owned. Most carriers have never had that meeting in their history.
You can't control the spot market, diesel, or what the mega-fleets pay. You can control whether your company is the one place in trucking where the plan is real, the promises hold, and the numbers are known on Friday instead of the 20th. In a sub-1%-margin industry, that's not a nice-to-have. It's the whole ballgame.
Frequently asked questions
We're in a brutal freight market. Shouldn't we wait until rates recover to start EOS®?
The down-cycle is the best time. Rates are outside your control; deadhead, turnover, maintenance cost, and unseated trucks are not — and those are exactly what EOS® tightens. Carriers that build the discipline now run a lower cost per mile into the recovery and take share from the ones that just waited.
Our TMS and ELD dashboards already show us everything. What's different about a Scorecard?
A TMS shows hundreds of numbers to whoever logs in; a Scorecard puts 5–15 weekly numbers in front of the leadership team with one owner each and a meeting that acts on them. The data isn't the discipline. Most carriers have the numbers and no operating system that makes anyone accountable to them.
Does EOS® work for an asset-light brokerage or 3PL, or just asset carriers?
Both, and mixed operations too. The seats change — a brokerage's chart centers on carrier sales, customer sales, and operations rather than dispatch and maintenance — but the tools are identical. EOS® works on the leadership team, not the trucks.
Our leadership team is the owner, a dispatcher, and a controller. Are we too small?
The sweet spot is a leadership team of 3–7 in a company of roughly 10–250 employees — a 15–20 truck carrier often qualifies. If the owner is still personally dispatching, the first quarter of EOS® is usually about building the seats so that stops being true.
A business coach for trucking & logistics leadership teams
If you've been searching for a business coach for your trucking & logisticscompany, here's the honest difference with EOS®: instead of generic advice, you get a complete operating system — installed by a world-class business coach and Certified EOS Implementer® — that starts from your numbers, your seats, and your 90-day priorities.
Jon Kludt has facilitated 300+ sessions with founder-led leadership teams across a wide range of industries. The system is industry-agnostic by design; pages like this one exist so you can see it translated into your world before you ever book a call.
Ready to run your trucking & logistics business on EOS®?
Book a free 90-minute meeting for your leadership team. You'll leave with practical tools you can use right away — whether or not we work together.
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