John Koller: Great! That’s good to know. Last question and then I’ll let it go. I know you said that in general, freight rates have been coming down and you’ve been adding new business, and I’m just curious, you know are you ï¬nding it more difficult given that maybe you’re ï¬nding the competition a little sharper? And I’m just wondering how you’re balancing that out or how you’re able to get additional business, I guess?
Rob Sandlin: Yeah, let me clarify, just to be sure for you and others on the call. When I say spot freight rates coming down, that’s for the general freight industry and not for us, and that’s where a lot of those owner operators have been working. So when you read the different trade magazines and the trade journal stuff about spot freight prices, that’s not really going to be indicative of what’s going on in the tank truck industry. Hours are going up, and if you look at our revenue per mile and our quarterly announcements that we’ve been making. Our freight rates are up dramatically over the last two years and we don’t see any reason for that to decline. It’s certainly not going to decline for us, because we’re going to partner with people and customers that are looking for quality service and they want to guarantee that they’ve got that supply, compared to selling diesel fuel or gasoline at a margin, the freight portion of this thing is while it adds up to a lot of dollars on a per gallon basis, it’s pretty small, comparatively.
So we’re really not seeing any rate pressure downward.
John Koller: Great, thanks so much.
Rob Sandlin: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from John Deysher with Pinnacle. Please go ahead.
John Deysher: Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for take our questions.
Rob Sandlin: Thank you.
John Deysher: You indicate the revenue was up because of rate increases, higher fuel charges and improved business mix. Could you elaborate on the improved business mix? What are you talking about there speciï¬cally?
Rob Sandlin: Sure. Yes, I’ll give you a couple of examples. So one of the things that we talked about as we were downsizing our business and trying to then right size everything and improve margin, was to go out into the marketplace. Let’s say that we can’t add a driver capacity, and in a given market, we’ve got x number of drivers. And we have to decide how are we going to make that business more proï¬table. Then we go to our partners and say, €˜look, we’ve had driver pay go up, we’ve got inflation, we got this, and we need a rate increase of x and if they said, well, that’s just more than we can stand, then what we would do is work with them to exit or downsize and if they can get somebody to haul it for them at a low price, and we can add business with somebody else at a higher price, then that’s what we’ve done in a number of different markets.
So it’s a combinate €“ that’s kind of what we’re talking about with business mix. More so than changing products.
Matt McNulty: Yes. It’s really just a mix of the customers. It’s swapping one customer for a higher rated piece of business.
Rob Sandlin: Does that make sense?
John Deysher: Yeah, that makes total sense.
Rob Sandlin: Okay good.
John Deysher: But, do you see that continuing in terms of swapping out low margin customers for higher margins customers or are you kind of reaching the end of the road there?
