Rob Sandlin: I hope we are reaching the end of the road. There may be a pocket or two with that. But we really are and have aligned ourselves with some good partners and good customers and folks that we’ve done business with for a long time, and I think the whole world has had to wake up a little bit to the supply chain and driver shortage and that it’s real, and it’s frankly not going anywhere anytime soon. And so I think our customer base and the tank truck industry realizes that it’s really important to get their products to the end user. And so there are always cycles in business, but I think we’re in a cycle where they understand that and they are going to be willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for us to make a reasonable return on our investment.
John Deysher: Okay, okay, that makes sense. Good. In terms €“ you mentioned the driver count 360 or so. What was the turnover for the most recent quarter?
Matt McNulty: Rough turnover at this first quarter was 73%.
Rob Sandlin: 73% and John, what’s interesting is we’re turning over very few of our drivers that have more than a year’s service. Most all of that churn is in that ï¬rst year driver.
John Deysher: Right, but that’s pretty close to what you were a year ago, right? Weren’t you around 72% in Q1 a year ago?
Matt McNulty: I don’t know that I could go back to Q1 a year ago and get that.
Rob Sandlin: For the year, we were up
Matt McNulty: For the year we were about 83% overall last year.
John Deysher: All right, okay. So it’s coming down a little bit, that’s good.
Matt McNulty: Two years ago it was 100%.
Rob Sandlin: Yeah.
John Deysher: A year ago it was 100%. Okay, good, so it is coming down.
Rob Sandlin: It’s now where we want it, but we are going through a lot of gyrations and just trying something new all the time to see what we can do to impact that new driver so that it has more staying power, because we spend a lot of money training these folks and so we’re really spending a lot of time and energy there.
John Deysher: Okay, all right, good. On the CapEx side, could you explain the economics behind replacing versus – replacing lease with owned trucks, you said better ï¬nancial results. Could you talk us through why the results are better by owning a truck as opposed to leasing it?
Matt McNulty: I mean, quite frankly it’s come down to the fact that they are building in a significantly higher cost of the tractor, and then they are throwing interest on top of that than what we can purchase ourselves.
John Deysher: So the returns are €“ how much better the returns from owning the truck versus leasing the truck?
Rob Sandlin: You remember the difference when we ran those numbers. John, I can’t remember the numbers. We ran all of that, and the other thing that’s going to happen is initially when you lease that truck, you’re paying out €“ over the life of that truck, you’re paying x number of dollars or cents per mile for maintenance. So when we put these trucks on, for the ï¬rst two years, we’re going to see a signiï¬cant, at least the ï¬rst two years, we’re going to see a signiï¬cant reduction in that maintenance cost as well, because we’re just going to be doing routine PM type work. When you’re getting later in life, that thing might swing around a little bit in the other direction, but when we ran that whole model, it was quite substantial and we got on the phone with the leasing companies, ï¬nance guy, and he even agreed that in our, with what we were doing, it probably made more sense for us to own trucks.
