Built, Broken, Rebuilt: A Trucker’s Story of Lessons and Resilience

Summary: Resilience and experience in the trucking industry show how data-driven strategy, strong leadership, and a driver-focused culture help carriers remain profitable through freight recessions. KSMTA’s David Roush reflects on family roots, rebuilding after failure, and the importance of adaptability in surviving market cycles and building stronger, more sustainable transportation companies.

If you’re a KSM Transport Advisors’ client or regular FreightMath^TM News reader, you know KSMTA’s prime objective: helping carriers optimize profitability in any freight cycle. That mission has been my guide for decades, and for me, it’s deeply personal. I’ve experienced the highest highs and lowest lows possible as the owner of trucking companies.

A Family Built on Freight

I’m a third-generation trucker. My grandfather, Carroll Roush, helped co-found Roadway Express in the late 1920s. My father, David (Dave) Roush, built and sold O.N.C., a large California-based LTL carrier, and later launched ROCOR International, a truckload holding company.

My official entry into the industry came after college graduation in 1981, but I grew up in trucking, as many readers likely did. Truck talk filled our dinner table. Drivers often joined us. Many Saturdays, I tagged along to the office with my dad and grandfather. I even had a bodyguard during the Teamsters’ strike in the early 1970s. Every summer job through high school and college was trucking-related – from shop boy to central dispatch, with stints in safety, logs, mileage lookup, rating, and more.

Learning the Business: The Hard Way

After graduation, I worked – and in hindsight, trained – in many roles at various levels: dispatcher, driver manager, marketing, customer service, MIS, sales, and finally as president of a 3,000-truck company with operations across TL, port operations, inbound traffic management, and freight brokerage.

We managed multiple capacity models (company, owner-operator, lease purchase, agents, brokerage, and more) and terminals from coast to coast. We purchased over 30 trucking companies during this time; most were fixer-uppers. Each role taught me something new about leadership, systems, and scale.

Déjà Vu: Then and Now

The market I operated in had a lot in common with today’s freight recession. Deregulation opened the door to thousands of new carriers, creating intense rate competition. Freight brokers and logistics intermediaries emerged to manage capacity and rates in a volatile environment. Shippers began shifting from decentralized traffic managers to the faceless MBAs and AIs that manage transportation today.

What We Did Right – And Wrong

Our company did many things well: focused on key metrics (leading and lag), published complex financial statements quickly, integrated technology into processes for scale and timeliness, managed pricing and lane selection with a sophisticated (for that time) version of FreightMath, and created a driver-centric culture that treated people with dignity.

What we didn’t do well was grow aggressively in a terrible market. We spent, invested, and leveraged assets in pursuit of outlasting everyone else and becoming a billion-dollar company when the market turned. The headwinds caught up with us, and in 2002 we filed Chapter 11; our assets were sold through the bankruptcy estate.

Watching a company you built dissolve is gut-wrenching. But it was also the best classroom I ever had.

Rebuilding and Returning

After the bankruptcy, I stepped away from trucking for five years. But in 2007, the industry pulled me back. I started Top Line Advisors, the foundation of today’s KSM Transport Advisors and FreightMath.

Why This Story Matters

I share this story not out of nostalgia, but because I know exactly how hard it is to fight through a freight recession, and how worth it survival can be. In the months ahead, I’ll share lessons, analysis, and hope for those working to emerge stronger.

To learn more or discuss any of the ideas shared above, please contact a KSMTA advisor via the form below.