Trucking's Hidden Weapon: How Kevin Rutherford Helps Owner-Operators Succeed

Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast

In this episode of Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast, host Brent Hutto is joined by Kevin Rutherford, Owner and Presenter of LetsTruck.

Join them as they explore:

• How few educational opportunities exist for owner-operators
• How Kevin got started in trucking, writing, and radio
• Turning four years of working through severe debt into a business opportunity
• And much more!

Having started as a Small Fleet Owner for FedEx Ground, Kevin Rutherford has built a name for himself in the logistics industry. Until 2022, he hosted Road Dog Trucking’s Trucking Business & Beyond for Sirius Satellite Radio. He is now the Owner and Presenter of LetsTruck, a call-in business advice show that has helped thousands of owner-operators and fleets improve their fuel efficiency and maintenance costs and increase their bottom line.

Episode Highlights:

[05:40] There is very little help out there for owner-operators and carriers in today’s market. If you look at other industries, there are all sorts of education opportunities for almost every role and guides on how to get started. For those of us in the trucking industry, there is very little. Kevin is one of the only sources for advice, so he hasn’t had much competition working his way up to the top. But he still had to build credibility, and he was able to do that with his own experience of being a Small Fleet Owner. Everything he learned along the way could help someone else, so he became the widely respected voice he is today.

[11:44] Trucking was in Kevin’s family, but they never had a family business. Almost everyone was an owner-operator at one point, doing their own thing. His father was somewhat of a reluctant owner-operator. He was more interested in the mechanical side of things than business. He kept going through cycles of going bust and having to get a union job until he earned enough money to start again. Seeing this, Kevin did not want to get into the trucking industry until he was 21, and it seemed like a good idea to bide time until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. By his fourth year, he had 11 trucks. With each one, he was losing money, and he got to the point where attorneys recommended filing for bankruptcy. Having borrowed lots of money, he felt like filing for bankruptcy was morally wrong, so he started working off the debt and studying business more and more. Four years later, he was debt-free.

[17:07] Through facing bankruptcy and the grueling process of paying back debts, Kevin learned how to run a successful small trucking company. Yet, he didn’t run one. Instead, he focussed on building a company that could help other people not go through the same stress he did and learn the right to do things from the very beginning. He wrote an accounting software, which eventually became ProfitGauges, and started writing articles for Overdrive magazine. From there, he was invited to speak on the Partners in Business panel, which he ended up presenting. It was intense with a fear of public speaking, but Kevin quickly realized he was good at answering questions, which started to pave the way for LetsTruck.

[24:25] Kevin’s transition from magazines to radio came from Dave Nemo. Having read his business columns in another magazine, Dave called him up and asked him to come on his show for an interview. After just 15 minutes of the interview, Dave stopped him talking, and they started taking listener’s questions due to the sheer volume of calls and texts the radio show received from listeners. Although it was meant to be a one-time thing, Dave asked him to make it a regular feature whenever his business column went out. Before even a week had passed, the schedule got bumped from monthly to biweekly and then up to weekly. From there, he became a guest on two other Sirius XM shows and eventually asked to start his own, which is how Trucking Business & Beyond was born.

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