David Parker: Yes. Number one, I am more bullish than reporting some of the freight management being down and TEL the equipment and those kind of things from a business, from a freight standpoint, during a time that we hit the bottom, so things are not great, but I am becoming more and more bullish. There are more opportunities that are presenting their sales. And I do think it’s — some of that is because of what Paul talked about is that we’ve worked hard since 2018 and then 2020, we have worked hard on 2 things. getting deep in the supply chain, whatever that means, getting deeper in the supply chain; and number two, bringing value to our customer for that customer bringing value to us. And we have those kind of conversations with our customer because I don’t care if it’s 2 20 or 21 or 23 when you need some freight.
If I’m not bringing value to that customer and if they’re not bringing value to me, one or the other is going to leave because we are going to get to the point where when we started down the road of being you call, we’re not going to be a UCO-hall carrier and just hope we get enough phone calls. We’re going to have commitments from our customers, not that dedicated is running 20 trucks and they need to go to 15 because they have no freight. I understand that. That’s just business. But not, okay, we’re going to do a ban because at the end of the day, we used in abuse ’21, and we don’t like your pricing. Let them go do that. I don’t care. We will go do other things. It means reduce our trucks, whether it means go do acquisitions, whether it means repurchase stock, whatever that means, we will do whatever the market tells us to do.
So I am bullish there in a very bleak time out there that there’s going to be a lot of opportunities going forward. Now, how do I watch that? It is to the things you’re talking about. It is through looking at certain things that we’re involved in. I mean high security loads right now are popping up a lot for us. And that’s good because we’re one of the few that do high security. I would say in the last couple of weeks, we got 4 or 5 accounts and some good volume accounts that could replace all the brokers anyway, some good volume accounts on high security. And so that’s a great opportunity for us. Another one would be that as the brokerage number goes down, it’s telling me a little bit about where the market is going to be for us. So, I do think that there’s opportunities out there that can overcome what we’re seeing in industrial production and what we’re seeing in housing, I think there are some things that are happening.
But I also burn again, we’ve been working for years to be that carrier that’s bringing value. One of the reasons why our rates have not been slammed so far, minus the brokerage and you can do the math on what I told you that will get you to a number that’s negative, it’s not positive. But as I look at that, I go Brandan. I’m 65, Bert, I forgot what I was going to say. It will come back in a bit.
Joey Hogan: Thank you. This is Joey Hogan. We’re a different company that’s worked very hard the last 4 or 5 years to bring value. And the reason why our rates have not dropped like the market has dropped is because our customers recognize it. And I mean this is — they’re verbalizing this to us, and that is our business is down, but you do such a great job, and you’ve given us the teams when we needed it, you give it the dedicated trucks when we needed it. And we’re not asking for a rate reduction. We were really fair for the last 24
