And so as I mentioned before, you look at our truck count and about what we described in network, is one definition of our network, but the other definition gets supported via power only that resides in our brokerage business, and that’s really how our customers sees it. They see our orange trailer out there in the trailer pool and then we optimize the capacity type. And so our network business is larger from a customer view because of that power only component. So we’re not looking necessarily to shrink our assets that we put into that as long as we can get to the appropriate return. Obviously, we’re in a very difficult part of the cycle right now. But it wasn’t too long ago, a couple of quarters ago, we were quite happy with where we were there.
So we just got to get back and get those fundamentals relative to the market recovery, getting after the price and it would be terrific to keep that over the long term about where it’s at.
Operator: Your next question comes from Bascome Majors with Susquehanna.
Bascome Majors : Just 2 quick clarifications on the quarter. Even if you add back the $0.08 in uniquely negative items, and considering that you were pretty in touch with how the bid season went when you gave us your outlook in August. It feels like what happened was a pretty significant negative surprise to what you expected and certainly seasonality. Is there any way to kind of rank order the biggest surprise as to kind of where you were 3 months ago to today, knowing what you knew then outside of the $0.08 or so in charges that you called out earlier, just trying to understand a little better about what would happened that was unexpected.
Mark Rourke : Yes. I understand the question. I think when we certainly expected to see a bit more of seasonality in the business return after not having — and particularly is what we were projecting relative to the capacity attrition that we expect it to take place in the marketplace. So the lack of seasonality that’s unfortunately continuing now a bit more than we would originally expect even into the fourth quarter as part of that. Some of the final price negotiations and the book — in our book, I think we had about 25% of our book renewed in the third quarter. In our truck business, I think 30% might have renewed in our intermodal business, vice versa somebody got that backwards. But that’s the order of magnitude of the renewals.
And so those weren’t quite as favorable as we initially had planned as those occurred. And then — the third element of that is what do you realize out of that? And what’s the mix of realization that your customers are tendering based upon their business and how they’re doing. And so that’s also something we try to project and generally are pretty good at. But this market has more variability and more uncertainty on a series of factors to include where our customers are as well.
Bascome Majors : Thank you for that clarity. And we kind of hit this in other ways before, but I just want to go back to it. From the dollar-ish run rate that you’re guiding now, you’ve been pretty clear that — there’s not a lot of seasonal opportunity to improve on that in the first quarter, which makes a ton of sense. But as we get deeper into the year, are there meaningful opportunities besides the price lever to really change that trajectory in the back half? Or anything else about seasonality that may not hold versus where you’ve looked historically in the first half of next year versus the second half of this year?
Mark Rourke : Seasonality was the question first half versus second half. I guess as I’d look at it is where are we having the opportunity to continue to improve results. And I think a higher mix of our dedicated offering, which we’re continuing to grow and having great momentum, I think, is a real positive not only for 2024, but beyond. We’ve, I think, articulated the intermodal opportunity as well, which I think, can be a real adder to what we’re doing in 2024. And then the question always is where do we stand on the network business, and that’s the one that we are leading most into and have the most improvement opportunity. But I do believe we’ve got good momentum in 2 key strategic growth drivers for us, which is intermodal and our positioning now that we are no longer an approve stage with our new relationships in UP.
We’re going through now a full allocation with the UP with the CPKC and the high-performing CSX. It just, I think, puts us in a better place in the customer minds and our performance and where we are and what we’re trying to accomplish as we go into 2024 than some of the uncertainty people felt. I think we performed really well operationally, but there was some uncertainty as we made some of those changes coming into 2023.
Operator: And the next question comes from Bruce Chan at Stifel.
Bruce Chan : Just dig into brokerage a little bit more. You all saw maybe a little bit more volume pressure than some of the peers out there have been reporting, a few of them were actually reporting some shipment growth. Any thoughts on what may have driven that difference in experience if it’s something to do with the mix of business or power only or if it’s just broadly you being more disciplined on the pricing side?
Mark Rourke : Yes. I think we might get critiqued there of being very disciplined on our net revenue per order and our targets there. I think our data and our insights, both on the shipper pricing and the carrier costs are very good, and we weren’t looking to take risk and losses in this environment. And so if we were going to trade, Bruce, we were going to trade on volume as opposed to trade on margin.
Bruce Chan : Okay. That makes sense. And then just a follow-up here on the dedicated side. You talked about some of the pipeline opportunities and the visibility there in your opening remarks. Some of your peers have talked about maybe some weaker pipeline conversion? Are you seeing the same thing? And what kind of gives you confidence in your visibility there?
Mark Rourke : We might be seeing some elongated pipeline decision-making, but when you look at our growth organically and — because we’ve also picked up some acquisitions that are doing quite well and taking some additional share with our current customers, and we’re introducing them and they’re specialty to some other customers that we just have a few more plays in our playbook to get after growth there, Bruce, and it’s playing out in our results. And we have, at this juncture, really good visibility to fourth quarter, obviously, in first quarter start-ups. And that’s what gives us our momentum. We don’t have a lot of closed second and third quarter start-ups yet, but we’ve got a good pipeline that we believe the momentum will continue.
