So, I don’t want to get into specific numbers but I do think that you’re going to see meaningful improvement in both ops and maintenance costs. And I think you’ll also see even though the cost of equipment is going up — if you think about the little gain on sale that we had this year, which was just over $2.2 million or about $3 million adjusted when you exclude out the terminal sale, you’re going to see, I think, meaningful improvement because what we’re going to be selling next year, we’re not going to be trading in leased vehicles. We’re going to be selling used vehicles that we own. And so you’ll see some meaningful improvement in gain on sale next year. So we think the fixed cost of equipment could be flattish, even though the price for that equipment is going up, but we believe meaningful improvement in ops and maintenance and also meaningful improvement in fuel economy with that newer equipment.
Jason Seidl: Tripp, just 2 clarifications. One, when you say next year, are you referring to $24 million or $23 million?
Tripp Grant: I’m stuck in the past. I’ve got to live in the past…
Jason Seidl: Sure.
Tripp Grant: I’m talking about 2020. Sorry — I’m sorry. You’re right, I was referring to 2023 and then.
Jason Seidl: So the other thing I wanted to say, so you went for $0.21 a mile to $0.29 a mile worsening as you went throughout the year. What is the maintenance cost on these new trucks that you’re bringing in, so you can put it into perspective for us?
Tripp Grant: Exponentially, better. I think that there have been cost and I don’t know if it’s realistic to get back to what we consider all in ops and maintenance costs of 2021 number of $0.21 per mile, the parts of the cost of tires, the parts of labor, the cost of parts all have had significant cost inflation. But I think that I think you could see that number lands somewhere between the $0.21 and $0.29 per mile. It’s a little bit hard to say because the other key component to this is uptime and utilization. We had to keep — throughout 2022, we had EPA considerable number of excess units, particularly in our dedicated fleet in the fleet just because we would have a customer that would require 15 trucks and we were putting 20 trucks in there because 5 of them were down.
And it will help us with uptime and utilization, too. So it gets a little bit muddy when trying to do some sort of cost reconciliation by just looking at ops and maintenance. But I think you’re going to see an overall improvement and efficiency of that — in the truckload — larger truckload segment, which both includes expedited and dedicated.
Jason Seidl: That’s a great explanation. And last, and I’ll turn it over to somebody else. Expectations for share repurchases. Obviously, you guys were very aggressive last year, repurchasing your own shares and supporting them. This year is going to be a down year by anybody’s estimates in terms of just your overall financials. Are we going to see you still be the same aggressive way as you did in ’21?
Tripp Grant: I don’t want to comment on what we’re going to do in the future, but it is public information on what we have out there and what we’ve repurchased today. And we still have about $20 million of availability on what we — on the plans that have been approved and are in the market today. We’ll evaluate that. Obviously, we have the strength in our balance sheet to do that if we so choose, but there’s a number of different options that we may choose not to do that. So it’s certainly in the arsenal of things that we could act on, but there’s been no decision or no public disclosure of us committing to something additional beyond what’s out there today.
