Amit Mehrotra: But Adam, if I could just quickly follow up on that for a second because the strategy seems to be we’re going to sit around and wait for somebody to skew up and that’s when the market share opportunity is going to come. And that maybe have been the case for the last 10 or 15 years, but what’s Plan B? Like what happens if no national player screws up because everybody is focused on service and they actually deliver, what is the plan of action then?
Adam Satterfield: Look, we’re not just sitting back doing nothing. We’re fighting every day to get better and working with each one of our customer accounts to make sure that we’re in there. We’re having conversations about how we’re going to be able to grow with them. But we also don’t have to feel the need to go out and try to chase volume, which many of competitors have done in the past and then they get their network full and they’re unable to grow. So the point that I was making earlier about there’s not been as much growth when you look at what has happened sequentially over the last couple of quarters from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. I mean, when you look, I see that our share has improved from second quarter to fourth quarter from third quarter to fourth quarter as well.
So we’re doing this in an environment that is not creating a lot of freight activity. I think that when we get out of this environment, I think that the time to challenge our model would be if we’re in an environment where there is robust economic growth, and we’re not able to achieve anything, but we are a long ways from there.
Amit Mehrotra: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Operator: The next question comes from Eric Morgan of Barclays. Please go ahead.
Eric Morgan: Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to follow up on the demand environment and in particular, how you would characterize the depth of this two year slump in volumes, because obviously, the industry has underperformed industrial production quite a bit since early ’22. But if we benchmark 2019 and try to kind of look through the pandemic, both are kind of somewhat flat. So just curious if we think we’ve overcorrected and could see a bit of a catch-up on the upside, if there is some macro improvement? Or if you think maybe we’re more an equilibrium now and you should see more of kind of industrial production type growth from here? Thanks.
Marty Freeman: Yes. I mean certainly in the past 2 years have felt more like the 2009 recession. When you look back last year and see double-digit tonnage in some periods and overall for the year, we were down 9%. And it was a very tough operating environment. But again, we continue to try to power through it and position ourselves for future market share opportunities. And I think that’s what we’ve done, managing all of our other incremental costs along the way to keep producing whether is by far and away, the best operating ratio in our industry. And so I think that when you get back to an environment where transportation in general, the truckload market, in particular, has been incredibly weak. And I think there has been some spillover of volumes that have gone into that industry just given the overall weakness there and players that are willing to move freight, take some maybe large heavy-weighted LTL shipments for cost or less than their cost to operate just to kind of keep the trucks rolling.
That’s been another challenge, if you will, that we’ve had to contend with. But that will all change as the economy improves, just like we’ve seen in prior cycles. And I think that our industry will be tight once again. I continue to believe that despite some other carriers adding service centers that we will be a capacity challenge industry in the future as well. And ultimately, all of the service centers and door capacity that existed with yellow, not 100% of that is going to come back into the market, as we’ve already seen with the process that it’s played out over the last 9 months. So those are all things that we think will end up creating opportunities for us again. And I think that once we have that tailwind coming at us from an overall industry demand standpoint that we’ll be able to capitalize and be able to significantly grow our volumes like we’ve been able to do in the past and then leverage that growth through the operating ratio.
And if you look back in any period past when we’ve lost the operating ratio in any given year or period and go back to 2009 and look at that, we lost the operating ratio deteriorated 270 basis points that year. Once we get the power of leverage in the model, we more than recover anything that we’ve lost. In that example, in 2010, when things really were robust again, we were able to improve the OR by 360 basis points. So I feel like though from getting to the improvement cycle that it feels similar to 2017, where things are kind of on the edge of getting ready to start showing improvement again. And hopefully, we’ll continue to see some growth as we go through the middle part of the year, some year-over-year growth and further sequential improvement and then things really start taking off and we’ll go from there.
But that’s — the good thing about our mid-quarter updates is we’re going to give it to you as we go along. So you’ll see the final April results we’ll put in our 10-Q the final May results from a revenue standpoint will publish. And you’ll know it is developing versus me having to look through the crystal ball and predict when we’re going to see the big inflection in revenue coming.
Eric Morgan: Appreciate it.
Operator: The next question comes from Bruce Chan of Stifel. Please go ahead.
