Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on YouTube Lewie Pugh drove for 25 years and logged 2.5 million safe miles before he ever set foot in a congressional office. Today he is Executive Vice President of OOIDA, and he describes himself as the closer: the one who follows the association's four Washington lobbyists into a meeting and puts an issue into plain language a lawmaker can actually understand. We sat down with him at OOID...

Watch on YouTube Todd Spencer joined OOIDA as an owner-operator member in 1976 and has spent the half century since fighting for small business truckers. We sat down with him at OOIDA headquarters in Grain Valley, Missouri for a long conversation about the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the fights it has won, and the ones still ahead. He was elected to the board in 1978, came on s...

Watch On YouTube Plaintiff's attorneys, large carrier associations, and the autonomous vehicle lobby. Those are the fights OOIDA is in right now, and Rod Nofziger walked us through all of them. We sat down at OOIDA headquarters in Grain Valley, Missouri to talk about what the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association actually does, who it is up against, and why the fight never ends. Rod worke...

From one desk, one chair, and a seven line phone in 1995 to a trucking, brokerage and transloading operation three decades later. Shannon Himango joins us to walk through the whole thing. He grew up in Two Harbors, Minnesota as a doctor's son who knew nothing about agriculture, got hired by Cargill out of St. Olaf with a degree in biology and economics, and got sent to East Dubuque, Illinois inste...

Watch on YouTube Nobody really knows how much grain is in the pile. Rebulk is a Kansas City startup using LiDAR and a mobile app to scan bulk commodity piles and return exact volume and tonnage, and co-founders Warren and Cole joined us to explain how it works. Grain, feed, fertilizer, sand, salt, landscape rock, even raw tree logs with no defined pile shape. Walk around it with your phone, and th...

Watch on YouTube Frankie Wilmot didn't grow up in trucking — he married into it. A former finance guy, Frankie became CEO of Corcoran Transportation Group about four years ago, right as the industry was heading into one of its worst downturns in history. In this conversation, he takes us through the full story: two cousins who started competing trucking companies in Billings, Montana back in the 1...

Watch on YouTube Ted Fyock Jr. spent six years as an Army armor officer, deployed to Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division, and then built a career in consulting before starting Carolina Expressways, a bulk freight brokerage, from nothing. Jared Flinn sat down with Ted at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on land George Washington once owned, to walk the whole road. Winston-Salem roots and a family that has serv...

Watch on YouTube Emery Sapp & Sons is 100% employee owned, 3,000 employee owners strong, with 98 millionaires and about 600 trucks on the road every day. Jared Flinn sat down with co-CEO Robert Gillis in Columbia, Missouri to talk about what happens when a founder sells his company to the people who built it. Billy Sapp started in 1972 because the civil contractors wouldn't show up on time, so he...

Watch on YouTube   Jesse Knight bought a four-axle dump truck the fall after he graduated high school in 1992, because there wasn't enough family farm ground left for a third man. Thirty-five years later, Knight Trucking runs roughly 40 trucks out of Lebo, Kansas, split evenly between end dumps and pneumatics, hauling rock, sand, salt, and food-grade freight across the Midwest. In this episode, Ja...

On his deathbed, Keith Titus told his son: "You're not welcome at Page. I have a plan, and you're not part of it." Three years later, the plan had failed. The company was down from 230 trucks to 70, losing a million dollars a year, and the bank had cut them off. Then Dan's mom — a 27-year school bus driver who never worked a day in the business — made a decision that changed everything: she put ev...

They fined him $18 million. He built a diesel empire anyway. Jerad Wittwer grew up the son of a St. George milkman and rancher, overhauled his first engine at 13, and turned a passion for horsepower into Performance Diesel Inc. (PDI) — one of the most recognized names in diesel performance. But the road there ran straight through one of the most controversial chapters in trucking: EPA investigatio...

Bill Wallis went to work at 13 to help his family. He served in the 101st Airborne, came home, and bought a single gas station in Cuba, Missouri in 1968. Today Wallis Companies runs 67 stores, a 42 truck bulk fleet moving 120 loads a day, and employs around 1,400 people. In this episode, Matt and Alan take us inside the fuel hauling world most truckers never see: the predictive dispatch tech, the...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qF-YbIEGZJM Rob and Kate have been together since high school. Years ago they took over the family farm and trucking operation, doubled the business, and then watched 2025 turn into the hardest year of their lives. In this episode they get honest about what it actually takes to run a trucking company as a husband and wife team. The 16-hour days through the freigh...

Tom Keller spec'd his first truck at 20 years old to haul watermelons off his family's farm. He'd drive a load to Indianapolis, not like the price, keep driving to Detroit, sell them, and set the cash on the kitchen table — then do it again the next morning. That hustle became Keller Logistics Group: 350 trucks, four divisions, and $200 million in sales out of Defiance, Ohio. In this episode, Jare...

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vMtf0ZtSbbA   Fleet maintenance isn't sexy — but it's one of the highest expenses in trucking, the most controllable, and by far the most ignored. Justin Brevik of Bosch FleetMe returns to the BulkLoads Podcast to break down exactly where fleets bleed money on maintenance and how to fix it, whether you run 3 trucks or 3,000. Host Jared Flinn and Just...

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OUVacbL2k7g   For Matt and Sharon Kill, the goal was never to have the biggest fleet. But it took growing to 21 trucks — and nearly losing what mattered — to figure that out. The family started with nothing: one truck, a borrowed belt trailer, and a 1950s pay loader that lost steering every time you let off the throttle. After Matt got let go from Jo...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/n2-i0RKCoWs Craig Broerman left a corporate mechanical engineering career, sold the money meant for his grandparents' farm, and bought a belt trailer in 2019. Six years later, he and his cousin Alan Lennartz are running 7–10 trucks across the Midwest hauling DDGs, soybean meal, cottonseed, and industrial products — and they did it before either of them turned 32....

Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xnLyii6krVg   What does it take to run a four-generation family business through cotton, cattle, pipeline restoration, AND a 7-truck hopper fleet — all at the same time? This week we sat down with Bob Blackwell and his son-in-law Jared Reaves at Blackwell Trucking in Wayne, Oklahoma. Three generations of Blackwells have worked this land. Bob started chasing pi...

Check this episode out on our YouTube: https://youtu.be/hc33VvhAS_I   In 1950, a teenager who'd dropped out of school to save the family farm bought one truck and started hauling gasoline. Today, Wayne Transports runs 750+ trucks, moves nearly 290,000 loads a year, and posts driver turnover rates a fraction of the industry average. In this episode, we sit down with the next generation of Wayne own...

Watch episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QILNrGk8Sfs He started with one truck at 18 years old — and went bankrupt within a year. Most people would have quit. Kendal Mast didn't. Today, KM Wood Products runs 60+ trucks, hauls some of the heaviest freight in the country, and has quietly become one of the biggest players in AI data center freight — with 65% of their entire fleet dedicated to it. B...

Watch the YouTube Video Here: https://youtu.be/t4i4jJeppwM Julie Andrich didn't grow up planning to run a trucking company. But when her father — a city kid who taught himself farming, failed his way into freight, and built Autumn Transport from a single truck in 1980 — passed away in 2015, Julie stepped into the seat. Now president of a 140-unit bulk carrier out of Woodbury, Minnesota, she shares...

Check out the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ow6f_ZQ813I   Eric Glidewell, owner of JP Transport, sits down to share the real story behind building a 45-truck cement hauling operation from scratch — with no trucking background and no blueprint to follow. In this episode, Eric breaks down: The "$50K per truck" formula he uses to measure profitability How he grew from 2 trucks in 2009 to 45 tr...

Watch the video on our YouTube: https://youtu.be/Iv9GTvypqdc 109,000 new trucking companies entered the market in 12 months.  That's 300 new competitors per day. So the real question isn't "Is trucking competitive?" It's: How do you win anyway? This is the BEST trucking advice we've captured over the past few years — condensed into one powerful 30-minute masterclass for owner-operators and fleet o...

Missouri Director of Agriculture Chris Chinn joins Jared for a deep dive into the realities of modern farming, livestock operations, rural policy, and how government programs actually impact producers on the ground. Whether you're a farmer, livestock producer, trucker, ag student, grain hauler, or rural leader , this episode gives you a front-row seat to the conversations shaping agriculture today...

In this episode, Jared Flinn sits down with Ben Huston from the Iowa 80 Group — home of the World's Largest Truck Stop — to talk about the incredible history behind Iowa 80, how the company supports America's truck drivers, and what makes their locations in Walcott, IA, Joplin, MO, and Kenly, NC a home away from home for drivers across the country. Ben shares stories from his journey in the trucki...