Justin Long: Good morning, Rusty. Well, I wanted to start with a question on customer mix, going back to some things you were saying earlier.
Rusty Rush: Sure.
Justin Long: Do you feel like the small customers that are unassigned, do you feel like the activity there has bottomed it, down 10% this quarter? And then can you share on the other side of the coin how your national accounts are performing right now just so we understand the relative trends?
Rusty Rush: Sure. No, you bet I’ll get the numbers like I said down 10%. I don’t have that answer, but if the comps are going to get easier, so I got to tell you, if you’re going to year-over-year comp, yes, they’re probably right there, okay? Sequentially, I don’t know if there might be another couple three points left in there, buddy. I don’t know that we — the market’s not totally been cleansed yet, okay? There’s still folks out there that are hauling freight for basically barely break even and can pay my fuel, okay? I mean, I heard some numbers that people were all afraid for last week when I was up there. I met with a lot of customers at ATA, and I heard some of the slashing that was going on out there. So it’s liable to continue for another six months here, okay?
So that means you’re going to keep flushing some out. But I would expect the year-over-year comps with that market to be around the same, sequentially it may have a little bit more knowing that it wasn’t as bad at Q1 and Q2 last year, right? Okay. So it depends on how you want me to talk about it. But I would suggest that it’ll stay similar on a year-over-year basis, I guess, would be what I would tell you, because it got worse as the year went along. When it comes to the national account business, we’re really proud of the efforts because we put in a lot of dedicated people and spent some money on that. That’s all inside our G&A and focused on it because our ability to grow that piece of our business is directly tied with the second most valuable piece of this company.
My people are always first, first and foremost. But the second piece is my map. My map is bigger, our map is bigger than anybody else’s map. And when you can provide consistency of service, and I can take you to interview many people, many large companies that we can do that with, when you can provide that consistency, your opportunities to me are endless. I mean, they’re not endless, but they sure feel like it for us. We’ve got plenty of conquests out there that we don’t do business with, or a large national accounts. So, this consolidation has continued around this industry for years and will continue. And that ability to go out and capture some folks, and I’m not going to get into any name and names on an earnings call, but we know there’s still plenty of opportunity.
I sat in meetings with folks last week, almost begging us to come over and do business with them in some way. Regardless of whether their business is up or down, I can’t change the environment. But what I can do is provide a different solution. Understanding your competition and differentiating yourself is what it’s all about. And we know that, with that kind of growth, we grew 19%. I’m talking about being down 10%, but it’s a little, it’s in a lower margin, but it’s still really good business, right. And the other piece you’ve got to keep into account is our service business. We expect our service business to be up next year. We may take a hit in some parts of business, but we expect our service business to grow. Why? Because we brought 150 technicians this year, many of them mobile.
