Saia, Inc. (NASDAQ:SAIA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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We feel a little better than kind of where our footing is now, what our productivity looks like. And most significantly what our service level is and our ability to restore service as we move through even though last week of weather challenges we’ve had. That’s part of the game right now. I think the path to outperforming Q1 is we get a favorable operating environment in terms of everything from weather and such. And I think we can perform well through here. We’ve kind of given our thoughts around the margin profile. That’s kind of where — we’ve got — as we look at history, that feels like kind of where we would be. Certainly, is our path to better? Sure.

Amit Mehrotra: Okay. Yes, that’s helpful. And maybe one more, maybe more important question than like the near-term stuff. So I’m just curious how much of the productive labor force? Did you guys lose through attrition as you guys cut the hours across the board? And really what I’m trying to get a sense of the next, kind of, most important thing is how carriers are able to bounce back efficiently with fluidity as volumes come back in late February and March hopefully. And I just want to know are you properly resourced with respect to dock workers and drivers to kind of meet that opportunity just given kind of the big cut to hours and maybe the attrition that drove?

Fritz Holzgrefe: Yes, the attrition has been — we’ve seen a bit of it here in the last few weeks, months. And that’s been relatively small, we have focused very diligently as we’ve reduced hours. It’s important to us that we balance that across our workforce. As we’ve seen some attrition, we haven’t replaced it, so that allows you to better balance across the remaining headcount. So we feel like we’re pretty well positioned that we can flex from here, flex up from here. And some of the things that we have done around workforce as we’ve had dock — part time dick staff have elected to move on to other things. We’ve used our supervisor ranks to work on the dock. And in some cases, we’ve used some of our city drivers. All those are ways for us to keep that all important connection with those critical employees, so that when time comes and I think it’ll come that we can flex out of this. I think we’ll be in a good position to restore and continue to grow.

Amit Mehrotra: Yes. Okay. Thank you. Nice job to you and the team. Appreciate it.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jack Atkins with Stephens.

Jack Atkins: Okay, great. Good morning and thanks for taking my question. So I guess, Doug, if we go back to something you mentioned earlier, sort of, we’re talking ourselves into this idea of a soft landing. I don’t know if that’s right or not, but I would just sort of be curious if you and Fritz could maybe comment a bit on what your customers are telling you about maybe how they’re expecting their business trends to kind of progress through the year. Just any sort of color or context around that?

Doug Col: Well, I mean it’s hard for us to pull in an anecdote here or there and try to draw a conclusion. I mean, we’ve got a very diverse customer mix. We’ve got 60%, 65% industrial exposure, but not any one customer makes up more than 3%, 3.5% of our revenue. So I’d hate to take one anecdote and try to draw a conclusion from that. I mean, we should look at the same data you all are looking at and I it wasn’t all that favorable in January. But I’m just thinking about what’s going on in the jobs market and with some of the other economic data. It doesn’t seem as bearish as it was late last year in terms of the outlook. But for us, I think like Fritz has keyed on, I mean, I think we’ve gotten a pretty good position from a cost standpoint with the volumes we’re currently seeing.

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