A load that doesn’t fit one carrier’s network usually fits well in another’s. My team’s job is to figure out whose.
We’ve delivered to more than tens of thousands of unique addresses this year. With that kind of volume spread across the country, there should be a good home for most loads within the carriers we already use, all of which have cleared our vetting process.
When that fit becomes predictable enough, some carriers will even accept our tenders automatically. They know the freight. They know how it fits their network. And they already know they want it.
That network fit matters because freight changes constantly.
A plant goes down for three days of maintenance and suddenly there are trailers with nothing to do. We start looking for other freight that can keep that capacity productive.
A customer heading into peak needs to pull orders forward and land a block of volume next week. Our Managed Transportation team understands what that customer needs, and my team goes to work finding the carrier capacity to deliver it.
That sounds straightforward. It rarely is.
Sometimes a carrier will tell me, “We’re having a hard time retaining drivers on this piece of KBX business.” That conversation often leads to rate. But my first question is different:
What can we change about the freight to make it better for the driver?
Maybe the issue is dwell. Maybe it’s when the appointment is scheduled. Maybe the lane makes it difficult for a driver to get home. Whatever the answer, I want to understand it.
Because replacing drivers costs carriers money, and eventually those costs show up somewhere in the rate.
We heard a lot about that at our Strategic Carrier Summit this year. Carriers weren’t just talking about tractors, trailers and freight. They were talking about drivers.
Their drivers are asking questions like, “Why was my pay down 10% last week?” or “Why didn’t I get home in time to see my kids?”
Someone at that carrier has to answer those questions.
That’s an important reminder that network fit isn’t an abstract optimization exercise. There is a driver sitting behind the wheel at the end of every decision we make.
That becomes especially important for smaller independent operators. They don’t have thousands of trucks to absorb inefficiencies across the network.
Empty miles matter. Fuel matters. Time matters.
If our network aligns closely enough with theirs to reduce empty miles, more of the miles that driver runs are productive miles.
That’s good for the carrier, but it’s also good for the shipper. Capacity that fits a carrier’s network is capacity they have a reason to keep showing up for.
I’ve been around that side of trucking most of my life.
My dad worked his way up through LTL sales and eventually became a partner in a for-hire OTR carrier in Southern California. He started before deregulation and still consults today. About half our conversations are about his grandkid. The other half are about trucking.
So, I’ve been hearing about freight at the dinner table since I was a kid.
And today, the driver conversation is one I pay especially close attention to. Carriers are navigating driver turnover, changing labor dynamics and new rules affecting non-domiciled CDLs, all while trying to keep their networks productive.
I spent the freight recession on the carrier side myself, trying to figure out how to stay profitable after rates went through the roof and then fell off a cliff. I came to KBX in May 2026 with the market starting to move again.
That experience changed the way I look at capacity.
An available truck isn’t necessarily the right truck. And the lowest rate isn’t necessarily the freight-carrier match that will hold up over time.
So, every day, my team goes back through the loads that got a “no” yesterday and asks a different question today: Whose network does this freight fit?
Because somewhere out there, there’s a carrier that wants that load to go exactly where it’s going.
My job is finding them.
Jared Denniston
VP of Capacity Solutions
KBX Logistics