We do like high-end consumer goods. They are good freight, but there’s just — the shipment looks smaller. So when you take a visit into any one of our terminals, you will like what you see from a cleanliness perspective, you just would like to see a few more of those boxes or you would like to see some of these boxes to be bigger.
Bascome Majors: Understood. Maybe to cap it off, we’ve spent a lot of time on the LTL business today for understandable reasons. Can you walk us through some of the assumptions you’re making for the intermodal segment on an organic basis pre-M&A? So how you are modeling that to trend versus seasonality? And maybe even a little structural reminder of your customer exposures between the larger asset using IMCs versus the smaller pure asset light or non-asset IMCs and ports in the shipping companies?
Thomas Schmitt: Yes. So Bascome, on the intermodal drayage side, what you’ll see is you’ll see — there’s two customer segments. And — so roughly speaking, it’s not exactly half, it’s probably 60-40. 60% of our customer base intermodal drayage are shippers that make or ship the goods that we move on their behalf. The other 40% or so are intermediaries that have the end customer as their customer. We like both of these customers a lot, and we work with them extremely well. We have found that when we get to work with some of the shippers directly, this is really, really good business for them and good for us. So we have a growth initiative in place. I mentioned it when I ran through some of the Forward Force initiatives before to grow over proportionately with some of those, they call BCO customers, customers that actually make and ship things directly.
So that will — so you’ll see some of that good BCO growth as some of the organic growth, also our sales force has been much, much more focused on organic growth in intermodal. So yes, we grow by those tuck-in acquisitions, but we also need to grow organically. And the one thing you should expect this year is the absolute growth rate in top line for intermodal year-over-year is moderating. And that’s not because we’re not organically growing. We are, as I just said, specifically BCO business. What is happening, though, is we do expect some of the accessorials, specifically for storage fees, detention fees to come down to normalize. Remember, last year, we had the preponderance of the year, oversized storage fee, accessorial revenues and detention fee revenues because we were helping our customers as things were coming onshore mostly on the West Coast ports, but also on some of the East Coast ports.
We helped them holding those goods until they could get moved. And we used our facilities in many cases for that. So that is something that will be expected to normalize. So when you look at year-over-year growth on the intermodal business, you will see a step down in percentage. That is mostly because of the accessorials normalizing.
Bascome Majors: And from an operating income perspective, in your plan, does expedited freight or the intermodal segment feel more pressure for the full year?
Thomas Schmitt: Expedited freight does. Difficult on each one of the three participants in that segment. The tonnage slowdown felt in LTL. Final mile appliance business is probably not intrinsically growing as much as it did. And truckload brokerage sees the same slowdown that LTL sees. Now having said this, just to take final mile as one example, that team has done a phenomenal job adding logos, meeting new customers, and that team has done a phenomenal job winning new markets with existing customers. That winning The Home Depot Appliance Carrier of the Year Award clearly helped us basically becoming the most compelling provider. But if you look at those two segments, the expedited freight segment, I think, is experiencing — and this is — I’m not taking any credit away from intermodal, but it’s experiencing a bit more of a headwind.
