Conference Transcript - RXO 2026-06-09

Operator

Okay, I think we're going to go ahead and get started here. Continuing on the transportation track, we're very excited to be joined by RxO this morning. From the company, we have Drew Wilkerson, Chairman and CEO. We have Jared Weisfeld, Chief Strategy Officer as well. Appreciate you guys coming. So first off, thank you very much for joining us this morning.

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

Thanks for having us here.

Operator

Absolutely, my pleasure. So this is an interesting dynamic we've been digging in kind of all morning with what's going on on the truck market because I think this is probably the most topical piece of the freight market as it stands today. And you guys are a great, I think, company to talk to us about that. So maybe we could start kind of high level and you could give us a sense of what you're seeing in the market developments over the course of the second quarter. It has been quite dynamic. I think you guys put out a press release a couple of weeks ago about how things work through the road check week. And that was, I think, a successful outcome for you guys. But maybe just sort of paint the picture of what's happening in the market in the second quarter.

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

I'd really break it up into three things. So first, on the supply side, you have a lot of supply that is coming out of the market. And, you know, we think there's still a lot of supply left that will continue to come out of the market in the coming months. The second thing that I would say is on the regulatory side. When you look on the regulatory side, it started with English language proficiency, then it ran into non-domiciled. Now you have Delilah's Law coming in. And now you've got an additional with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that came out recently that will impact really the small, smaller brokers off of that. So it's capacity coming out of the asset side, but it'll also be capacity that starts to come out of the brokerage market as well. And then the last thing that I'd say is demand. Demand is still not strong at this point. So what you're seeing is when you look at what's happening on the supply side, you're having a supply driven recovery. And it's the first time that I've seen that in 20 years of doing this. and you're looking at tender rejections that are now sitting in the mid to high teens. And for us, that's a great environment to be in. And when you look at what happens off of that, if customers trust you, there's a lot of spot load opportunities because as tenders are rejected, that becomes a spot opportunity. And so if customers trust you and you've got the right relationships, you're able to go out and capitalize on that. And the spots are typically at a higher

Operator

margin. Yeah. So I think that's one of the things that you guys highlighted and I think has been the strength of the business so far through this early part of the cycle is that you guys have been capitalizing on spot activity. So maybe give us a sense of, you know, I think you noted when you get the tender rejections, those become spots you guys are seeing. Why are you seeing that spot activity maybe more so than other folks? It's not that you're the only ones talking about it, but it does seem like there's been a bit of an outperformance on your business. Yeah, well,

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

and I think it goes back to, we've been in a freight recession for almost four years, right? And we've told you for four years that as this happens, we will be the ones who benefit from this. our top customers have been with us on 16 for 16 years on average yep so when you look at that the relationships are built on trust they're built on being able to service them in the past and so when times are tough for customers we're who that they come to and it's proven out to be the case again in in this current market and then you know i guess as we round out some of the

Operator

thoughts around capacity so we started with the safety and regulatory enforcement english language proficiency, non-DOM CDLs, ELDs, as we call it, the alphabet soup of regulatory, you know, enforcement. So I guess where are we on that process, right? So we started this discussion with like 200,000 non-DOM CDLs, but it seems like it's kind of maybe a bit of a bigger story than that. So maybe if you could help us put some thoughts around how you perceive the capacity

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

at risk in the truckload market. Yeah, I think that when you look at it, you know, one of the things that we've been told by the Department of Transportation is that they think that when you exclude private fleets is 20 to 25 percent of capacity and right now you're probably talking about high single digit low double digit that's come out so you're yeah at halfway or a little

Jamie Harris, CFO

bit ahead of halfway at this point and it's such an important point chris when you think about you know what that denominator looks like in terms of the amount of cdls that are out there right so i think it's well documented there about three and a half million uh cdls that are in the market but what's actually the percentage of cdls that are within the four higher truckload market that number is probably between 1 and 1.5 million. So then when you take what the FMCSA has talked about, which is about 200,000 non-domiciled CDLs potentially being at risk due to the recently enforced and passed new rules and regulation, 200,000 as a percentage of that 1.5 million starts to become pretty significant. And I think the FMCSA number is about 30,000 have already left. But then there's also some self-enforcement, right? Because the consequences is now of being pulled over with an out-of-service violation if your paperwork is not in order is pretty significant. So I think it continues to build, and you're seeing, to Drew's point, a supply-side recovery in the market. I think last week, industry-wide spot rates were up 40% year-over-year with tender rejections approaching 18%, and this is all with a muted demand environment. So I think it speaks to how much supplies come out and will continue to come out.

Operator

So I think this week we saw, you know, Ohio was maybe the latest state to, I think, revoke some licenses and kind of talk about not renewing new ones. And the month of May does seem to have been a little bit of a pivot point in terms of capacity. So if you look at the FMCSA data, it probably dropped the most kind of month over month that we've seen. It's been a steady decline in the last several months, but May was a little bit more pronounced. So I guess as we think about this, are there anything, you know, break points or otherwise that we're looking at that would suggest that there's, you know, going to be a lot more capacity coming out over the course of the next several months? I'm just kind of curious because it does seem like something changed in the month of May. And I'm not sure if it's Montgomery. We can talk about that in more detail as well.

Jamie Harris, CFO

Yeah, I think it is a continuation of the same trends that we've talked about. But to your point, as you think about the implications post-Montgomery, if you are a small to medium-sized broker and you've been leveraging capacity that maybe you shouldn't have been leveraging in the past, the implications could be pretty significant. So on the margin, are they increasing the selection criteria in terms of what must be true to drive on behalf of that broker and therefore could be tightening up the capacity market in a more acute way? That's certainly possible. from an rxo standpoint you know we have the added benefit because we are the third largest broker in north america where our procedures were already so robust uh in terms of what must be true to drive on behalf of rxo with you know minimum levels of insurance of a million dollars you need to have a carrier authority for at least 90 days not using conditional carriers all of that good stuff which is why we have such an exceptional safety rating for rxo but when you think about the implications of small-medium brokers that maybe were not or have not been as robust as RxO, could that be further tightening on what was already fragile supply-demand balance? Absolutely.

Operator

Now, it's a good question. I'm asking everybody the same question is, have you changed your carrier vetting standards at all in the post-Montgomery world? We're always looking at it,

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

but I think we were so far ahead of the curve. There wasn't anything off of Montgomery that we felt like, hey, we've got to do a shift in how we're doing this. If you think of how our business was built. It was built on the service model. So when you're talking about just-in-time shipments for automotive, when you're talking about high cargo value loads, when you're talking about hauling major technology up and down the road, you've got to have great processes and you've got to have great vetting that you're doing on the carriers. So we know the carriers that we're doing business with. We've got long relationships with the carriers. We'll always look to vet it stronger, but I think we were already at the leading edge of what was going on in the industry from the way that we had to build the business from a service perspective

Operator

for our customers. Okay. And I guess as you think about what might be the knock-on effect for some of the other brokers, one of the things that we heard when we were talking to a mid-sized broker is they said, you know, 50% of our volume kind of is directed down into the bottom, call it 20% of the carrier pool, meaning sort of the lower quality carriers because they feel like their buy rates down there were going to be more advantageous from a gross margin perspective. You know, number For one, do you think, is that a kind of stat we can extrapolate across brokerage? And how do you think about that? What's your experience been in general in terms of where you're buying your capacity?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

Well, I think one thing that people put out, and we were guilty of it years ago, is how many carriers are in their network. It is nothing more than a vanity metric. When you look at what matters, it matters how often carriers are coming back to your platform. And when a carrier comes to do business on RxO Connect, over 75% of the time, they're coming back within that same week. So that tells you that not only do we have great relationships with our customers, we've got great relationships with our carriers. We've got the best-in-class technology that they enjoy doing business with. We've got a unique program for carriers that allows them to get discounts on fuel, tires, roadside maintenance, all of these things that pull them back to our platform time and time again.

Operator

Okay. But that sounds like there is, I guess, amongst the smaller brokers, I guess I'm curious how you think they're going to react to this. I think there's maybe two schools of thought. There is the smaller broker will just sort of take on extra risk without sort of increasing insurance profiles. Maybe they'll increase insurance profiles. Maybe they just won't exist going forward. So how do you think about that secondary effect? Is there going to be a capacity reduction on the broker side in a bigger way?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

Well, I think one, you've already started seeing a capacity reduction on the broker side. You know, if you go back to 2024 or 2023, 10% of brokers went out of business. 2024, 10% of brokers went out of business. I haven't seen the numbers for 25, but I bet more than 10% of brokers went out of business during that time period. So you're already seeing a capacity reduction on the broker side. I think that this will accelerate it even faster. your point on do they just not ramp up the insurance customers aren't going to give them a choice okay protecting the customer's freight is going to be the most important thing so they're going to have to do that and then do they have the margins to be able to support it do they have the scale to be able to support it and that's why for a company like us scale is important scale matters the more scale you've got the lower that you can actually pull down your cost per shipment and if they don't have the scale it's going to be hard for them to be able to do that yeah

Operator

Yeah. Your point about the shipper point is an important one because that's going to be sort of how I would imagine the framework of the market is going to evolve as shippers will drive a lot of this. So what have the conversations with your customers been like in the post-Montgomery world? I know it's only been a handful of weeks, but how are they sort of thinking about this? Are they getting a little bit concerned? Is there a push, you think, to go to the larger brokers these days?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

I think that shippers were already on a path of looking at consolidation of not just brokers, but who they're doing business with and who has delivered for them in the past and rewarding the people who have delivered for them in the past and trust. I think that you'll continue to see them go down that path. And I think that because customers know our vetting process on carriers, we've been able to build that trust with them. We show them what the vetting process is on carriers. We show them the types of carriers we use. we use we can show them our safety scores and put them up against any asset-based carrier within their network and it's all a positive story for them yeah and i guess the last question i had just

Operator

kind of about this specific topic is how you think about how the carrier pool responds do you think some of these folks who are maybe owner operators who just don't have a safety score because most of them don't and they realize hey this might be more difficult for us to do we now need to you know join you know a fleet or we might need to do those kinds of things there are going to be a consolidation event on the carrier side that you see coming as a result of all this?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

I think so. I don't know, but I think so. I think that you'll see that. And I don't know that it, I think that it'll probably help the midsize carriers more than anything because they may not want to go drive for the biggest of the big carriers. They may want some of the little independence that they've got of being able to haul as an owner operator. Can I go join a hundred truck fleet, 200 truck fleet versus joining somebody that's in the thousands?

Operator

Okay, that makes sense. So we got a pretty good landscape of what's happening on the capacity side. Let's talk a little bit about demand because I think you did note that demand has improved. I think over the last couple of years, the consumer has been sort of holding up its end of the bargain for the most part, but we haven't really seen much on the industrial or the housing side. It seems like based on looking at ISM and a couple of other things that are LTL, you know, wait for shipment, those kinds of things that maybe demand is beginning to pick up a little bit. So what are your thoughts? I would say that we're still in a soft environment.

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

It's still not in 2019 levels. And so you talked about home building. That's still down. And for every new home that's built, it's eight truckloads. So that's a big, big factor on what happens on the demand side. Industrial manufacturing has been a positive. Retail and e-commerce has been down less than some of our other verticals. Automotive has started to pick up, but it's coming up off of the floor. So it's still not running wide open. And, you know, for us, the biggest growth areas that we see are on the AI data centers as well as on the technology space right now.

Operator

Is there a way to break down what your exposure is currently to data centers or to AI? And I don't know how you guys think about that as a percentage of your business.

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

Well, some of it bleeds in into what other verticals would be. Like if you think of piping that goes in off of that. So it's not, to put it in an AI data centers would be difficult to be able to put it out there because some of the customers, we may not even know that it's going to AI data centers of what they're doing. If you're thinking of the pipes that would go in, if you would think of the infrastructure that's being built, if you think about the steel that's going in, like everything

Operator

is touching AI data centers right now. Okay. And I guess the, you know, the view is that was a fast growing, but very small piece of the market is the right way to think about it is obviously the growth has continued to be relatively robust, but it's becoming a bigger piece of the overall pie so we'll see it more noticeable going forward well i'll give you a anecdotal story um we won a

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

managed transportation customer six eight weeks ago and it was as you all know managed transportation is a long sales cycle it runs a year plus and so when we started the bid process it was 30 million dollars of freight under management as we got into execution stage it was 60 million dollars of freight under management as now we're in the onboarding stage and not just getting the deal done, it's over $100 million of freight under management. So we think that it is fast-growing

Operator

and our customer evidence supports that. Okay. In the last couple quarters, you've been talking about the pipeline of business that you expect to be hitting. I guess maybe could you give us an update on how you're thinking about the pipeline, where we are in that onboarding process, and is it sort of pointing you in the direction you thought it would be sort of 2Q and

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

beyond? Yeah, we talked about resuming volume performance around the middle of the year. And we put out at the time of earnings that our volume was down 2%. I think Cass Freight Index was down four. So we started out performing sooner than what we said we would. And for that to hold true, obviously, we said that volumes for the quarter would be around flattest. That tells you that it's got to get better than down two for May and June as we go forward. So I think that we feel good with what we put out in the past and feel good about being able to outperform the market. Again, this business is on service. It's on technology that you're building. It's on the relationships and it's on the results that you've created for customers. And I think that we're in a good position as we enter into what is an emerging new market. And how about spot versus

Operator

contract? So that's one of the things that I think you noted after the update that you gave us post road check week is that the spot activity was picking up. We talked about it already a little bit, but where are you on the spot versus contract spectrum? Don't want to put out the exact number

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

into a quarter, but spots continue to trend very well for us. I think that we talked about in the past in an up market, we could be 60-40 in terms of contract to spot. You don't get the spot loads if you're not servicing the contract. The contracts are key. You have to have that. But because of the relationships and the higher tender rejections to go, we actually think we could run past 60, 40 and have more on the spot side than what we've done in the past.

Jamie Harris, CFO

To contextualize that, Chris, so spot as the percentage of our truckload volume in Q4 was 28% of our mix. Improved by 500 basis points sequentially into Q1 to 33% of our mix. We talked about on the earnings call last month how it went up another 200 basis points from March into April to 35% of the mix. We put out that release a few weeks ago post-road check on how it increased further in the month So, you know, continuing to go ahead and see spot increase as a percentage of the mix, I think speaks to, you know, it's a testament to the model where ultimately we're servicing that contractual book of business so well and we're winning the spots and that's and we're executing on the pipeline and you're starting in this environment, right, spot relative to contract in terms of gross profit per load can be significantly higher in terms of what that accretion looks like to the bottom line. So, you know, it's the first time we've seen this in the last basically three and a half years since we spun, right, where you get to market tightness and you have an ability to offset the contractual pressure because of the tightening market environment with spot opportunities in a pretty significant way.

Operator

And with spot up, I guess the implied is that some of the contract is down. I think maybe there's still some big customer dynamics that are working its way through your business. Obviously, you went through the merger. So, I guess, can you talk a little bit about that on the contract side, what you're seeing? Are we kind of done with that process, or maybe we're kind of at the tail end of getting the balance of those legacy contracts where they need to be?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

We're past that. So, if you think about it, we're 18 months past the acquisition now, or more than 18 months. And typically, a contract lifecycle is 12 months. So, we're past that. Bid season starts in Q4. It goes through Q1, and it's implemented largely in Q2. So we're still implementing contracts from the previous year right now. But we feel good with where we are on contracts. Remember on contracts, there's two types of contracts. You have your primary award, where your tender acceptance better be at an all-time high. And then you have a waterfall routing guide, which is your secondary awards. And there's still contracts, but the requirements for accepting them, if you're 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th down a routing guide, are not the same as what it is if it's a primary. Okay.

Operator

That makes sense. And I guess let's talk a little bit about, you know, gross profit per load. And I think the guide is sort of at least flat quarter over quarter is what you guys have said, I guess. How do you see that? Given what we've seen in the market and the tightness that's out there, I guess, how do you see that developing as we go through the year? Just kind of conceptually, what are some of the puts and takes we should be thinking about in the near term?

Jamie Harris, CFO

So in the first quarter, truckload gross profit per load was up 9% sequentially. That was the fastest growth rate that we've seen in three years. We talked about in Q2 how our expectation was for gross profit per load to increase again relative to the Q1 baseline. On the update that we gave a few weeks ago, we talked about how our new expectation was post-road check. Typically, you see market tightness in the month of May, combined with supply coming out and just seasonal volumes as the quarter progresses. And over the last three to five years, we've typically seen about a 7 to 900 basis point reduction in terms of gross profit per load, May versus April. And the update that we gave is we now expect that to be at least flat relative to April, given the strong execution on spots that we were just talking about. So we certainly expect to see another improvement in gross profit per load, as we talked about, from Q1 to Q2. you know from the progression from q2 to the back half of the year i think that's really going to be a function of the overall market environment and that interplay between contract and spot do we have a peak season right do we have more supply coming out and what's the interplay there but i think the the key point to take away is we are in a unique position where because we're servicing the customer freight so well because we're executing on this pipeline which grew more than 50% sequentially or sorry 50% year on year from Q3 into Q4 last year that with a strong win rate of 40% we've got the ability to actually offset the contractual pressure which is the first time we've had that ability in three plus years and the accretion relative

Operator

to contract can be quite strong. Yeah and so that sort of naturally leads into you guys gave adjusted EBITDA guidance 27 to 37 is the second quarter number that you guys kind of threw out there as you think about that dynamic you set that guide before we had the road check and as you noted you outperformed that i'm not asking for an update on guidance but just sort of big picture within that range better road check probably is a good thing you know what are the other sort of puts and takes we should be thinking about in terms of 2q and then we can

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

talk a little bit bigger picture i'll let jared walk through some of the numbers but how does gross profit per load trend how do volumes trend yep and then in last mile are we able to continue to increase productivity. All of those can move the needle one way or the other based off of the range that we gave. Gross profit per load can move it the most. Yeah, the most. And to piggyback

Jamie Harris, CFO

off Drew's comment, so $27 to $37 million was the Q2 outlook. And we talked about at the time of earnings at the midpoint, what was embedded in terms of expectations was that gross profit per load would take a step back in May relative to April. Clearly, we put out a release three weeks ago which suggested that did not happen so you can certainly put put the pieces together in terms of you know an environment where spot continues to increase as a percentage of the mix and then you know from the and then to Drew's point other lines of business are about its transportation and last mile and last mile we did talk about embedded within our outlook was that on a year on year basis you would see an improvement from a stops perspective that's right to q1 where q1 was down high single digits year on year impacted you know certainly significantly due to weather um but given uh strong execution of the team and customer onboardings and wins we expected that rate of change to improve nicely into q2 okay and then as we think about the rest

Operator

of the year so this is a unique environment and obviously a progressive tightness on the truckload market is maybe not something we always see um cognizant of the fact that as we flip over the calendar into july we typically go into a little bit of a low post holiday so that's not always the best month for brokerage in general but what would normal seasonality or how do you think about shaping sort of the profitability of the business through the second half of the

Jamie Harris, CFO

year what are the things we should be considering yeah so normal seasonality we talked about on the call a few weeks ago was uh from q2 to q3 the company typically sees a step back and adjusted primarily due to the fact that last mile uh our strongest year of the our strongest quarter of the year is the second quarter so we've got negative seasonality from q2 to q3 within last mile we did however talk about the ability to outperform typical seasonality given how strong the execution has been with our brokerage business so if you think about just spot continuing it to increase as a percentage of the mix executing on the pipeline with new business despite soft demand coming into the fold onboarding new freight under management within our managed transportation business managed expedite on the automotive side all fold again is there certainly an opportunity to outperform typical seasonality because of that for sure and then into Q4 the question really is going to be is this going to be the fifth year of in a row of no peak or will we actually see a peak season so that's a great segue that was one

Operator

of the things I did want to ask it's been coming up a little bit more now and I think it's probably because of what we're seeing on the ocean side so it does seem like volumes are beginning to pick up a little bit I think we're getting some indications of a slightly earlier peak from an ocean perspective rates are beginning to move there. Have you had conversations with customers about peak season? I mean, you know, we just have to look back to last year post Thanksgiving spot rates kind of went parabolic, right? So there was a tightness in the market last year. I think it stands to reason that capacity might be tighter when we get to the peak season than it is today.

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

So how do you think about that? So last year, you're right, rates went up, but what didn't go up enough was tender rejections. So you did not have what we're talking about right now where you where you were getting spots, so all you had was the compression on your contract gross profit per load because carrier costs were going up. Whenever you're in an environment where you're getting the spots, that will create a more robust peak season. On the demand and what we're hearing from customers is still early. We've got some that are telling us they're pretty bullish on where peak season are going to be in. We've got some that are saying that they don't know yet, so I don't think that there's a clear picture yet where we stand in peak, but there's been a lot of years of not having a peak. And we're well positioned and we've got a good customer base that if it's there, we'll be

Operator

the beneficiary there. Is there anything with fuel that we need to think about? I mean, obviously, your business is pretty good from a pass-through perspective around fuel, but whether it be customer conversations or otherwise that we should be thinking about, because obviously diesel prices are elevated. We just did a little panel this morning with a bunch of analysts we talked about. I think it seems the investment community has sort of taken the over on how long it's going to take to unwind some of the challenges we're having with the energy complex. So any Any thoughts around fuel?

Jamie Harris, CFO

Fuel, to your point, Chris, is mostly a pass-through for us. The only thing to think about from just a P&L perspective is just the optical impact it has on gross margin percentage, where in the context of fuel being a pass-through, you should think about base rate on a per-mile basis to our shipper combined with fuel surcharge. And then as you think about the gross profit dollars effectively will be unchanged in terms of what it means to the enterprise, but ultimately it's a higher revenue base, which is higher because of the fuel, so same gross profit dollar, higher revenue, deflates gross margin percentage, no impact on truckload, gross profit per load. So when we talk about the transition from Q1 to Q2, we talk less about the margin percentage because you've got that impact on margin percentage due to fuel, but on a per load basis, you'll see truckload gross profit per load move higher from Q1 to Q2. As you think about the impact on the carrier, I think it's a great point, right? As you think about cost to the carrier over the last 10 years are almost 40%, and that's excluding fuel, insurance, tires, maintenance, things that are structurally moving higher. And entering into this environment, I mean, most public ORs for a lot of the truckload companies in the high 90s, and that's before fuel. And now imagine for a small owner-operator. So then you add fuel into the mix from a working capital standpoint, et cetera. It's going to be tough, I think, for the smaller carriers. The one thing to also note, we talked about this just from an RxO standpoint, and I just thought of it relative to your question on fuel, higher revenue environment. We've talked about in the past how we are a user of working capital in the context of a higher rate environment and a higher fuel environment. So I should certainly expect that as the business starts to grow again. We are a consumer of working capital. You have the one-time use. You then grow the business. And then when the balance sheet shrinks at some point going forward, you have the release.

Operator

Yes, makes sense. I didn't ask explicitly in the context of the conversation around Montgomery, but any thoughts on how you guys might be thinking about your insurance exposure as it stands today as part of the P&L and maybe what it might mean going forward for you?

Jamie Harris, CFO

Sure. So when you think about sort of that excess liability from a casualty standpoint, which is what I think you're getting at, for our brokerage business, it's about, call it 50 basis points of revenue within the brokerage business. So call it anywhere between 15 and $20 million per annum. In terms of where that goes from here, I think it's too early to tell. As you can imagine, we have excellent relationships with our insurance brokers and underwriters and being in the position that we're in from the standpoint of, you know, excellent and robust processes that are already in place with very good safety ratings. You know, you look at accidents per number, 100 million miles. You know, it is materially below industry-wide average, which I think all bodes well for as we think about the premiums going forward into 27 and beyond. But I think the key point there is this speaks to the benefits of scale. As the third largest provider of broker transportation in North America, we've got the ability to absorb higher insurance premiums that many brokerages cannot. So as you think about that analysis over time, where effectively how much capacity is going to come out of the industry, What does that mean in terms of incremental TL market tightening and what has to occur in terms of market share gains and structurally higher gross profit per load relative to any kind of premium increase that we may face? It should be an NPV positive type of analysis. So that's sort of how we're thinking about it, where the market opportunity is so significant with the TL market tightening combined with market share opportunity for RxL that I think it's going to benefit the large scale providers.

Operator

Makes sense. I want to spend some of the last bit of time we have here talking about technology because that's important in the context of your business. So I guess maybe, you know, give us a sense. Maybe the first question is just how much of the business is automated today? And I know the term automation can mean a lot of different things. So maybe how do you think about automating the business and where you are in that process?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

Yeah, I think we're in the mid to high 90s that either one of the two functions is fully automated, either the carrier or the customer side. the customer side is a lot farther ahead when you think about being able to integrate technology with who our customers are. We do business with half of the Fortune 100 companies, half of the Fortune 500 companies. That's easier than implementing it sometimes with some of the smaller trucking companies. But I think we've got a lot of room to be able to continue to grow that. For us, we look at technology pretty simply. Does this help us improve our service? Does it help us improve our margins does it help us build a stronger relationship with the customer and if the answer to those is no it doesn't help you grow volumes it doesn't help you grow margins then we don't do it and so like everything that we do is tailored focused helping us grow volume helping

Operator

us grow margins and outperform the market and i guess as we think about you know ai and agentic ai and what it might mean to the business i guess is how do you think about it one of your competitors is sort of going through a productivity, you know, push. And I think the most obvious thing we can look at in their financial statements is headcount reductions. I don't know how you think about this. Is this more of a productivity tool that is really beneficial when volume is growing because you can just do more with the same amount of folks? Is it something that is a little bit more, you know, does it take away because you're pulling folks away? I guess, how do we think about that?

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

You want to be staffed for growth and be able to handle the upturns and be able to handle the spots, the projects, the mini bids like the market that we're in right now you want to be able to continue to increase productivity so to your point the same person's able to do more and one of the things that we highlighted on our last earnings cause i think productivity was up 15 year over year and like that's not a one-time stat like if you go back and look at it last year i'm pretty sure it was up around 15 last year so our investments in technology are paying off and our people are more productive we have people on the floor who are doing hundreds of loads per day and they're really allowing themselves to be able to focus on the relationship and creating tailor-made solutions for customers because of the technology that's behind them. So I guess if we sit here and think

Operator

about the market changing and obviously truckload, this feels like it has some legs in terms of the capacity tightness because of the strict changes that are happening here. You couple that with the context of the tech investment, I guess. What is sort of the trajectory in terms of the earnings power of this business obviously we've taken a step back after three painful years of a freight downturn so i guess maybe let's dream the dream again going back to the days when you bought coyote and what we thought this business was capable of like what does that path of recovery

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

look like i think you know i'll let jared come in with some more specifics but you know we've been very upfront at the bottom of the cycle it's a low single digit ebitda margin business yeah midpoint it's mids and at the high point is high okay even touching double digits um and we've done that before. Our brokerage business, I think if you remember back in 22, was doing double digit margins at that point. So I think that we understand the playbook. Now our investments in technology, I think that that can move all points of the cycle up one to two points because of what we're doing on the technology side. So we do see margin expansion coming in the future. And to piggyback

Jamie Harris, CFO

on Andrew's comments, this business is all about incremental margins, right? Across all of our lines of business, especially on brokerage. When you think about every incremental dollar of gross profit can hit even anywhere between 50 and 80 cents on the dollar whether it's attributable to volume or price from the bottom of the cycle certainly towards the higher end and when you think about you know all the investments that we're making on the technology front chris that you're talking about you know as we think about longer term what do we need to do we need to decouple headcount growth from volume growth so that way you can have the incrementals towards the higher end we spend more than 100 million dollars per year on technology and we're making those investments because we expect higher returns over time and we expect our people to become more productive. So loads per person per day. How do we go ahead and continue to ramp that higher and how do we go ahead and make sure that our people are focused on sticky relationships, building solutions with our shippers while leveraging the technology aggressively. We've said since day one post spin we're a tech enabled organization. We're not a tech company. We are a tech enabled organization within the logistics space that's focused on selling and servicing to our shippers and leveraging technology. So you start then compounding those incremental margins between 50 and 80 percent off of our Q2 outlook, which has an implied low single-digit percent EBITDA margin, gets to that mid-single digit plus pretty quickly. And I think the other thing to talk about is, one, we, I believe, are setting up for a multi-year type recovery, right? So it's not, okay, you're at, quote, unquote, normalized earnings and then you're done. It's no, you know, this could, based on all the supply that's come out, are we setting up for a multi-year recovery and then two for rxo when you think about that path towards normalized earnings the free cash flow capabilities of this company in the context of you know being asset light we've got two generally fixed expenses every given year 50 million bucks of around capex call it 30 to 35 million dollars of interest expense every dollar of ebitda on top of that normalized for working capital is going to hit the balance sheet at 75 cents on the dollar so you start talking about the ability to put substantial free cash flow onto the balance sheet and then pursue things that will clearly be uh accretive over the long term and we've talked about a balanced capital allocation philosophy across investing back into the business share share repurchase and inorganic there's a lot of opportunity to go ahead and create shareholder value over the long

Drew Wilkerson, CEO

term the only thing i'd add to what he said is you know the 27 37 is obviously low single digit we're nowhere near normalized earnings but we see a clear path to get there like when gross profit per load continues to improve you outperform the market on volume your last mile productivity continues to increase and you continue to onboard managed transportation freight under management like we're in a good position to be able to get there that's perfect i think we'll probably end

Operator

there as a shot clock has run out but thank you guys very much for joining us appreciate your time and the support of the conference thank you thank you thanks everybody