Okay, great. We're going to go ahead and get started. Really excited to be back. Chris Wetherbee, Wells Transportation, very pleased to be kicking off the transportation part of the conference here with RXO. From RXO, we have Jared Weisfeld, who's the Chief Strategy Officer. I think a lot of you guys know Jared, but he brings an interesting background of both Street, sell-side, and now on the corporate side. I think it would be really helpful. Well, first off, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate your time here.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Support for the conference. Listen, we're not currently out with coverage on RXO right now, so maybe it makes sense to kind of give a quick overview of kind of the key business lines and the end markets that you serve, and then we can kind of jump into what you're thinking about the market and take it from there if that's okay with you.
Absolutely. Let me start with the obligatory disclaimer. During this presentation, I may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws, which by their nature involve a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Discussion of these factors could cause actual results to differ materially is contained in the company's SEC filings as well as in its earnings release. You should refer to a copy of the company's earnings release in the investor relations section of the company's website for additional important information regarding forward-looking statements and disclosures and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures that the company uses when discussing its results. Okay. So for those that don't know, RXO, we spun off from XPO at the end of 2022, and we were the asset-light component of XPO.
We were known as North American Transportation. So when you look at RXO, about 60% of our revenue is our truck brokerage business, where we have been growing faster than the industry for the last decade with very strong gross margins. And then the 40% is comprised of two primary complementary services. One, last mile, where we are the leader in big and bulky in the United States, covering 90% of the U.S. population within 125 mi. And the other is our managed transportation business, where we act as the transportation department on behalf of our customers, and we've recently integrated our forwarding operations into that managed transportation business. So those are the segments.
Truck brokerage is where we typically get most of the questions in the context of it contributes the lion's share of operating income, and it really is. You look at the strongest growth in the industry over the last decade where we've been the brokerage industry. Just maybe taking a step back, the brokerage industry has continued to increase penetration as a percentage of the for-hire truckload market for the last 10-15 years. It's a $400 billion for-hire truckload market. If I look 10-15 years ago, brokerage penetration was in the low- to mid-single- digits. That's now in the, call it low 20%. Ultimately, it's better technology, better service, more flexibility. So ultimately, this is a solution that customers continue to want. We see continued opportunity for brokerage penetration to increase significantly from where we are right now.
We think that ultimately that can get to 40%-50%. When you look at RXO specifically within that truck brokerage business, we've been from 2013 - 2021, we talked a little bit about this at spin, but the brokerage industry grew at a very healthy rate, call it 8%-9% CAGR. RXO grew at three times that rate at about 27% CAGR. And throughout the last few years, there has certainly been a prolonged soft rate market, our volume growth has accelerated significantly, outperforming the industry with really strong gross margins like I was talking about. And that really is attributable to our service, which we believe is best in class, our technology, where we've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the platform, RXO Connect. And I think that's why our top 20 customers have been with us for 16 years on average.
I know I just said a lot there. Happy to go ahead and go into any topic you'd like.
Yeah. So let's sort of deconstruct that for a minute because I think those are really important points, particularly on, let's start with industry-wide, then we're going to dig into RXO specifically. So industry-wide, what do you think as we're coming out of what has been sort of a big upturn, obviously painful downturn for the brokerage business as well, how do we see a normalization of that growth penetration, that percentage, that 20% now, low 20s going to 40%-50%? Is that something that accelerates at this point in the cycle? Is it steady? Kind of what are we thinking about on a per-year basis here?
Typically, at this point in the cycle when the market softens, you will usually see customers move back towards asset-based carriers. RXO has been fortunate given that we have really transformed to a strategic carrier on behalf of our customers. So we've been able to go ahead and sort of withstand that. I'd say if anything, if you look at our, I mean, look what's been happening on behalf of our shippers over the last two-three years. When you think about how many shippers our customers had during COVID when loads- to-t ruck ratio was at 15: 1, tender rejections were at 30%, they needed supply in an aggressive way. So over the last two-three years, there's been this significant consolidation of carriers on behalf of our shippers.
RXO has been fortunate where ultimately, because of everything that I talked about before, even though the pie has been shrinking from a volume standpoint, look at what's been going on with the Cass Freight Index, et cetera, over the last two-three years, we've been able to go ahead and gain share and ultimately get a bigger percentage of that pie. So typically, I think this is where you're going with it, you would see asset-based carriers gain share relative to brokerage at this point in the cycle, given our strong relationships, given the service that we've provided, given our technology, our market share has actually increased significantly over the last few years.
Okay. Got it. That makes sense. Yes. And obviously, from an industry perspective, let's say 2025, 2026 are better years. From a freight cycle perspective, that's when you see that sort of industry penetration re-accelerate again as carriers or shippers are looking for alternate sources when capacity starts to get a little tighter. Okay. And then I think from your perspective, let's talk a little bit about, I want to talk about the market and get into what you guys are seeing there, but let's just round out the conversation around RXO specifically. What about, we hear technology a lot in this industry, right? And so I think it's helpful sometimes to take a step back and say, what exactly you are providing to your customers that is so attractive from a technology perspective, or what is sort of the secret sauce that allows that market share?
Because obviously it has been significantly better than what we've seen from peers.
When we think about technology, we take a pretty holistic approach. We think about it across three main cohorts: our customers, our carriers, and our employees. That's been fundamental for RXO for the last decade. Let's break each one of those down. From a customer perspective, to your question, I think it's really important that we have seamless integrated connectivity with our customers. We're dealing with the largest shippers in North America, Fortune 100, Fortune 500. They're going to be connecting through us with digital APIs. We need to make sure that we're able to go ahead and have that integrated seamless connectivity with our customers. Continue to receive always feedback from customers, shippers, carriers, and employees on how we think about making sure that the platform is offering what they want.
Even at a higher level, you think about just the updates that our platform has from a technology standpoint. This platform is updated continuously. I get updates from our CIO, Yoav, every two weeks on every update that's happened to the platform. This is consistent in terms of just getting feedback from all of those cohorts and making sure that we're implementing that across the board. From a carrier standpoint, it's making sure that we have the ability to, what we believe is the best app that's out there in terms of RXO Drive, and available obviously on both Android and iOS, and making sure that the carrier has the ability to go ahead, book the load, counterbook on the load if they don't like the price that they're seeing, and that'll match against all of our pricing algorithms on the back end.
But I think it's important to realize when we approach technology, we're not solving for a typical, we're not solving for a certain output in terms of x% of orders must be covered or created digitally. Ultimately, we need to be flexible. So if we've got a carrier that goes ahead, uses our app, they see the load, but they actually want to call one of our carrier reps to book that load, we're going to go ahead and have that conversation. So I think it's important to, it's the intersection of technology and people, which is I think what makes this model so special. When you look at on the employee side, I think employee productivity is a significant initiative that we've been investing in for the last decade.
And last quarter, if you look at loads per head per day in our brokerage business, it was up 18% year-over-year over the last 12 months, which accelerated a little bit from 2023, which was up 15%. So I think continuing to drive productivity is really important. And then one thing that I'd say wraps around all of those three cohorts is just the investments in our pricing algorithms as we think about all of the embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning that we put into the system a decade ago when Mario was still CIO of XPO, who was the architect of the original system. I think that ultimately our pricing suite of products is pinged hundreds of thousands of times per day when you think about just how sophisticated these algorithms are.
So hopefully that gives a little bit of perspective in terms of how we think about technology. And I think importantly, we look at it from a return on invested capital approach. Every single project that gets approved from a technology investment, it needs to be able to grow, it needs to be able to grow loads, it needs to be able to do it profitably, and there needs to be a return on invested capital associated with it.
Got it. So let's take that and translate it into the market. So maybe from an industry perspective, where are we in the brokerage cycle today?
So we said this on the call. We are certainly within a, we're operating within a prolonged soft rate environment. This is basically since we've spun, we've been operating in a loads-to-truck ratio of, call it two-five, tender rejections for the industry at low single-digit percentage. And I think this goes back to what you're saying earlier where we had this incredible growth during COVID. You've had a significant amount of new entrants from a carrier standpoint when cost of capital was free. You had a significant amount of brokerage entrants when cost of capital was free. And then you had falloff in demand when even though this freight cycle is unlike any other freight cycle I've seen before from the standpoint of it's decoupled pretty significantly from the macroeconomy.
I mean, the macroeconomy remains reasonably healthy, but when you combine the oversupply that exists in the market with the demand component of the economy, which has significantly shifted to services versus goods, you've seen this impact where ultimately freight rates have been impacted and there's too much supply relative to demand. So we've been operating within a prolonged environment now, a prolonged soft rate environment for almost two years since we've been public, certainly since even prior to going public, I'd say the peak of the prior freight cycle from a brokerage standpoint was first half of 2022. So we're now entering in year three of this prolonged downturn.
Fast forwarding to where we are right now, at the heart of your question, I'd say that when we gave our outlook for Q2, we talked about how seasonally the way the quarter typically plays out is you would have DOT Roadc heck week with respect to, which this year occurred in late May, and then you'd have a typical part of season. So we talked about gross margin per load and we talked about brokerage gross margin percentage moderating as the quarter progressed on our earnings call because our belief was that the market would tighten as the quarter progressed. If you look at current market conditions right now, we're not going to give an update for RXO, but certainly can talk to what's been happening in the overall market. And you'd see that loads- to-t ruck ratio has moved higher to 5:1.
You've seen that tender rejections are now basically at almost year-to-date highs at about 5%, which is interesting because that matches the prior peak of Road check week from last month and it also matches the winter storms from the month of January, which were really acute. So we'll see. That's obviously encouraging. I think there have been a lot of, let's say, false starts over the last two years where you start to see loads- to- truck ratio get to five, you start to see tender rejection get to five, and then two, three weeks later, they're back to two-three. So I think that we do want to see, we do want to see whether or not this sustains.
I do think that what we're seeing right now from an environment standpoint, I think is what we talked about on the call with respect to all of those seasonal factors.
So, I think it comes on both sides. So, let's sort of unpack the demand as well as the supply side. So, from a supply perspective, I was reading the other day that May saw sort of the smallest increase in capacity added versus the last few years. So, May is always sort of a capacity addition month for the reasons that you talked about, obviously more activity going on there. But the rate of growth in the fleet was significantly smaller than it was the year before and the year before that. So, let's talk about capacity because that probably is viewed as the biggest lingering issue: the fact that we have not seen the attrition that maybe we expected just given how soft the spot rates were. So, what's your take on what's going on in truckload capacity right now?
Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think that the entire industry would have thought that capacity would have exited at a far faster rate than it has since the beginning of the downturn. And I think that reality is the carriers entered this downturn with better balance sheets. When you think about the fact that the prior upturn was so strong both from a rate and a duration standpoint, combined with the fact that there was COVID relief money that was being given out by the federal government, they really entered this downturn with really strong balance sheets. And I think that's been able to, that helped them withstand this a little bit more. I mean, there's no disputing the math in terms of unit economics for the carrier.
If you sort of look at, and it'll depend on size of fleet and there are a lot of variables going into it, but if you look at the average cost per mile for a carrier, it's anywhere between $1.75-$1.80 a mile excluding fuel versus the current spot environment, which has now moved up a little bit of, call it maybe $1.55. So there's still negative marginal cost, but they've been able to go ahead and withstand the current operating environment because of those factors that I just mentioned. But fast forward to what happened in May. And I think as the year started out, carrier exits started out at a pretty healthy clip. So I think that was encouraging in terms of restoring the market to better supply-demand equilibrium.
The month of March took a step backwards, but then we talked a little bit about this on the call. The month of April saw an acceleration. Then the month of May, I don't think there was a week that went by when I wasn't getting alerts on very large carrier authorities that were filing for either Chapter 7 or Chapter 11. I think there were many carrier authorities between one and 500 power units that were going out and some had been able to withstand 100 years of the freight cycle. So I think that I think that is coming to a head a little bit in terms of the current operating environment is really tough for a lot of these carriers and the unit economics are prevailing to effectively adjust supply relative to demand. So we'll see.
I mean, as you look into the back half of the year, I think to have a true inflection, I think you need supply to continue to exit. But I do think you need demand to recover, which I assume we'll get to in your next part of the question.
Exactly. So that's a great segue. So when we look across all of the demand indicators, we look at there are reasons to be constructive. And I think the sort of the phrase I hear most often is that demand is "stable." I think that's probably what we hear. But then when we look at imports in particular, I want to kind of zoom in on that for a moment because that's really what stands out. And this has really been since the fall of last year, we've seen increase year-over-year in imports coming into the U.S., kind of a double-digit range and so far, so good. I guess what do you think is happening from an import perspective? Is this a pull forward to some degree? Is this inventory has finally got too low, so we're going to get a little bit of a normalization there?
How do we think about what's happening on the import side?
I think it could be, I think it's a great question. I think if you look at the port volume year- to- date, especially at the West Coast ports, every single month, even post Chinese New Year, you've seen significant year-on-year increases. I mean, even the lowest month was up double- digits year on year. So could that be some pull ahead? Could that be some market share shift between East Coast and West Coast given the potential for a strike on the East Coast? I think that's certainly playing into it. Could it also be, could it also be getting ahead of, could inventories have been depleted too low? I think that's absolutely possible.
I mean, if you look at the last six quarters on behalf of the largest retail and e-commerce companies in North America, retail revenue growth has outpaced that of inventory growth every single quarter for the last six quarters. Not quite back to 2019 DSI levels, but pretty close. So I think that it does speak to the fact that 18 months ago, the retailers were caught with too much inventory and we've had, we're in a much healthier position right now. So we'll see what that means for the second half of the year. I think ultimately and presumably that port volume growth should translate to over-the-road type volumes at some point. I don't think we're seeing it yet, but I do think that it's a fair conclusion.
That to me, I think is, I look at the import data as a leading indicator and that makes a lot of sense to me. I think it speaks to the health of the retail inventory positions.
Is there something, that last point is something that we've speculated on quite a bit, that sort of delta between what we're seeing with imports and what's actually moving over the road, is it just a lag that needs to occur? It's been an awfully long lag, if it is. So I'm kind of curious where the, what's missing between the translation of imports and actually what we're seeing in terms of activity on the road?
It's a great question. I pose that challenge to the team internally as well because that disconnect doesn't make sense. I do think it's a lag. I do think it has to get normalized. Could a lot of these, and maybe it's some pre-staging for early peak, that could be possible. But I do think that ultimately those goods need to go ahead and make, even if you assume that, I mean, I think you've heard about this in terms of looking at intermodal share shifts where even if the import volume is not making it over the road immediately, presumably it's going to a factory or a warehouse somewhere and presumably will have to get over the road at some point.
Yeah. Okay. No, that makes sense. That's something we've been watching and pondering. I guess the good news is if it's still coming in, it's got to have an impact at some point.
Agreed.
LTL, I think it's around 17% of the brokerage volume. So let's just spend a minute talking about LTL because I'm kind of curious how you guys think about it. That's been a very different and unique market in the post-Yellow bankruptcy. Kind of what are you seeing in LTL as it stands right now? Because industrial maybe hasn't felt quite as good as maybe some of the other end markets.
Yeah, that's fair. And I'm sure you saw the Industrial PMI from a few weeks ago, which obviously the new orders component contracted. But I'd say our LTL business, I would view as much more idiosyncratic relative to the rest of the market because it's still very much in growth mode. So our LTL business went from very little to non-existing four-five years ago to now representing 17% of our volume. It grew 29% year-over-year in the first quarter. We talked about that growing about 30% year-over-year in the second quarter. And what we're seeing from our customers is that from our core truckload customers in our brokerage business, we are winning their LTL freight. Almost think about it as a little bit like managed transportation where they are outsourcing that to us.
It is for us, at least. It is not transactional, but it's very heavy contractual type freight where if it's a smaller percent of their freight spend, it's a much larger percentage in terms of time and problems for our customers. And in many cases, I'd say 80% + of our LTL customers are actually coming from our existing TL base. So I think we're really excited about growth prospects. I certainly see the potential for LTL to continue to grow significantly as a percentage of the mix. And the thing that's really exciting about LTL in brokerage for us is that our technology platform is pretty sophisticated and the consolidation of the carriers, as you can imagine, is a little bit different relative to the TL market where the largest player probably has about 2% share. So I think the ability to automate these loads is really significant.
So I think the contribution margins for that business can be quite high. So I think that business is still very much in growth mode, as is all of our, when we think about core truckload, we think about LTL, we think about reefer, we think about flatbed. All of those are in growth mode. LTL has obviously grown quite nicely.
Where does that volume come from? Are you kind of slipping between an asset-based carrier and the customer, or is this coming from another broker? Where do you see the shared gains coming from an LTL?
Yeah, I think it's broad-based. I mean, I think ultimately that the customers see the exceptional quality and service and technology that we offer in TL. And I think we've made a concerted effort over the last few years to really continue to build out that business, and we're seeing the success.
Okay. Let's talk a little bit about some of the other, I guess before we get there, maybe one thing to wrap up kind of on the broader kind of market here, let's talk kind of two things. First, I guess you talk about sort of the playbook. I think you've talked about this on previous calls about every phase of the market. I guess where is it now? What is the RXO playbook for this part of the market in brokerage?
Sure. So we believe that we are at or near the bottom. And you think about the strategy that we took during this bid season where ultimately we wanted to make sure that we priced our book of business relative to where we think the market is going over the next 12 months. So we talked about pricing moving higher, and we felt that there were a couple, I think most importantly, ensuring that we're able to go ahead and honor our contractual commitments to our customers. That is the most important because ultimately when we think about setting price, we think about fast forwarding three, six, nine months from now. We want to make sure that our tender acceptance is high, our quality and service levels are where they need to be.
That's why we've been so successful over the last 10 years and why we're viewed as a core strategic carrier on behalf of our customers because we make our contractual commitments, we honor them, and that's when the market starts to tighten. We'll get the spot loads, we'll get the special projects, we'll get the mini bids because we're going to put in rates that make sense. We're not going to go ahead and, what's called in the industry, put in paper rates where the market changes and then we go back to our Fortune 100 customers, we rip them up and ask for relief. That's not a good way of doing business. I think it's really important that we price with where we think the market is going.
To directly answer your question, I mean, we think the market is at or near the bottom and we've priced accordingly.
Okay. And percentage spot versus contract as it stands right now?
So in Q1, that percentage was 79% contract, 21% spot, a little bit lower on the TL business because our LTL business is mostly contractual. So when you think about where that, so that's at the higher end of where we typically operate. If you think about that contract business, it's anywhere between typically 60%-80% of the mix for RXO. So in a weaker market, you'd expect that to be at the higher end of the mix, which it is right now. There's no real material spot volumes that are out there. So that's playing into that.
I think importantly, I think one of the key strategic advantages for RXO, because we have those strong customer relationships, because we can move quickly, I mean, if we have a sharp recovery, I mean, you saw this in 2020, you saw that spot volume as a percentage of the mix increase by almost 1,000 basis points in 90 days.
Yeah. Okay. All right. So again, that was my next question is how dynamic that ultimately can be because you're at the max from a contractual perspective that you probably ever will be on the truckload side. Is that fair?
We are bumping up at the high end. Never say never that it can't go a little bit higher, but we're certainly bumping up the high end of the range that we've operated at over the last 10 years.
Okay. Got it. All right. And just as we have about seven or eight minutes, if there are any questions from the audience, feel free to raise your hand. We'll definitely get you involved here. While everybody thinks about those great questions that they want to ask you, let's talk about some of these other services that you have here. So I want to talk about last mile first. So let's talk a little bit about last mile. Let's talk about first end markets served. Where's the most interesting sort of end markets that you're serving right now on the last mile side?
We're pretty broad-based. I mean, you should think about big and bulky. That's where we operate. It is electronics, appliances, fitness equipment. I think this will dovetail into the previous comment that I made earlier when you look at over the last five years from a demand standpoint coming out of COVID, just think about how many televisions or pieces of fitness equipment you ordered for your house, then multiply that across the country. Big and bulky has been under pressure for the last few years. Even if you listen to earnings calls on behalf of the retailers, they continue to talk about big and bulky continuing to be under pressure. We're really excited about the growth opportunity that we have.
I think we and the rest of the industry have been digesting that significant demand that occurred back in 2019 and 2020. Encouragingly, we've been outperforming the industry from a stop standpoint. I think our stops last quarter were down mid-single- digits. But I think really importantly for us, EBITDA per stop is up significantly. So when you think about the incredible service that we provide on behalf of our customers, we talked about this all last year where the beginning part of 2023, we took strategic pricing actions because ultimately we honored our customer contracts in 2022 despite the significant cost inflation that occurred in the business. And we took strategic pricing actions in 2023 to accommodate for that. So we grew EBITDA last mile 2023 versus 2022.
I think there are a lot of operational improvements that we're really excited about to continue to grow the profitability of that business.
Then I want to bounce around a little bit to make sure we get to some. I have some number questions I want to kind of go through too. And particularly this has been a topic as I've talked to all the companies in the space because everyone is focusing on kind of leaning out the P&L here. So let's talk a little bit about sort of cost savings expectations. I think the last time you guys talked about it was at least $35 million, I think of annualized savings. I guess where are those coming from? And if we are in a little bit of a longer phase of this sort of bottom than I hope we are, is there the ability to sort of ratchet those up at all?
So to start the year, we gave an expectation that we would take out at least $25 million of annualized operating expenses in 2024. We upped that by $10 million last quarter to at least $35 million of operating expenses on an annualized basis. And it's holistic and it's across the board. We think about, we spun out from XPO like we talked about in the back half of 2022. We inherited about $45 million of incremental corporate costs. So I think there was some opportunity there. Duplicative roles, duplicative vendors, post-spin, a lot of rationalization. I think payroll was also a source of opportunity as you think about just rationalizing for the current environment. So I think that we moved expeditiously given where we are at this point in the freight cycle. But I think it's also important to realize a couple of things.
We are still staffed for growth in our brokerage business. We can go ahead and handle probably 15% higher volumes from where we are right now. We still have a number of investments in running through the P&L. I think it's important to be able to do both simultaneously. Optimize the P&L for operating leverage when the market goes ahead and finally recovers and then inflects. Also continue to sustain investment, making sure that we're incubating growth drivers for the long term, including LTL and some of these other strategic modes that I talked about earlier between flatbed and reefer and really continue to invest in technology. You have to do both so that you stay close to your customers and you're in a position to go ahead and accelerate your growth when the market finally does recover.
And then maybe taking that and dovetailing it with the comments that you made about May, sort of the broad industry comments you made, 2Q Adjusted EBITDA step up from 1Q is material. So I guess how do you think about the bridge there? Help us get comfort around that 2Q outlook.
Sure. We gave an outlook of $24 million-$30 million of Adjusted EBITDA relative to $15 million of Q1. So to your point, up materially sequentially. And a lot of that is after the month of January, like we talked about in terms of that acute inclement weather, which tightened up the market without really any corresponding increase in sell rates. We brought cost of purchased transportation down hard. So we're replacing the month of January, which was painful for us and the rest of the industry, with a better month. That's number one. So you'll benefit from the full quarter of reduced cost of purchased transportation spend. Number two, seasonally from a complementary services perspective, especially in last mile, it's a seasonally stronger quarter in Q2. Our strongest quarter seasonally for last mile or generally Q2, weather starts picking up.
Think about a lot of doing it yourself type projects at home. Q4 with typical peak season was the strongest quarters for last mile. Then we'll have some of the benefits associated with the cost outs that we just talked about, which will be implemented. All of those cost actions were taken by the time of our call. So you'll see some of the benefit also in Q2. Most of those cost actions were to largely offset inflationary pressures. So on a net basis, I wouldn't, as you think about the year, I wouldn't think about just incremental cost outs dropping down to EBITDA. A lot of that was to offset some inflationary pressures, especially merit. We think it's really important to continue to pay our people in a healthy way. So that's really the bridge from Q1 - Q2.
Okay. Okay. Got it. And how much of the $35 million was in 1Q versus, I guess from an annualized basis? It was a month or is it?
The full actions in terms of the benefit of the $35 million of cost takeouts will occur in the back half of the year, but a large portion of them were, all the cost outs were taken by the time we had our call. So you'll have a large majority of them in Q2.
Got it. Okay. That's helpful. Appreciate it. Okay. And then maybe just to kind of wrap up, I think just bigger picture, whether there's M&A opportunity or if it's more just organic growth, I mean, it's not lost on me that there's a lot of organic growth opportunity for the business as it expands and that penetration in there. Kind of goes; it's a question I wanted to kind of hit on with leverage as well. Just kind of how do you think about capital allocation, how you want to expand the portfolio going forward?
Sure. So we've got a pretty balanced approach to capital allocation. And I kind of think about it across three vectors. Number one is organic growth to your point. I mean, we operate in a $400 billion for-hire truckload market. We've got less than 1% share. There is a significant opportunity in terms of organic growth that's left. So that's number one. And we also have a very strong return on invested capital within that brokerage business. So I think that's definitely one vector that we think about. Number two is through capital allocation via share repurchases. We have a $125 million repurchase program that our board authorized. And we've been slow to execute on that.
I think we do fundamentally believe that shares offer compelling value at these levels, but I think we are mindful of where our leverage is to your point, which is sitting at about 3x. I think longer term, we'd like to get that back down to 1x-2x. And then thirdly is opportunistic M&A. When we think about the ability to go ahead and expand the portfolio, whether it's in managed transportation, thinking about adding freight under management, really sticky long-term contracts. We've got north of $3 billion of freight under management right now. We've talked about that as something that's potentially interesting within our core brokerage space. Are there something within other strategic modes that could make sense, anything that could help increase scale? I mean, in general, I think we've been pretty open that opportunistic M&A is definitely part of the playbook.
Okay. That's great. Well, listen, Jared, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
All right. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Thank you.