Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started here. This is, last but not least on the transport track, at least this afternoon. We have the gentleman from RXO, so thanks so much for joining us. To my right, we have Drew Wilkerson as the Chairman and CEO, also Jared Weisfeld, Chief Strategy Officer here. Kevin Sterling is in the audience, so thanks, thank you guys for joining us and welcome to the conference.
Thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Absolutely. Maybe the best way to get started—I think we've been doing this with kind of everybody—is the markets are so dynamic. It's kind of interesting just to get your sort of lay of the land and what you're seeing in the environment as it stands right now. You guys obviously have a business that covers a wide swath of North American transportation. Drew, maybe if I could ask you to kind of give us a sense of where things are today in the market, and we can kind of dig into the business a little bit deeper after that.
Yeah, so if you look at what's going on in the market right now, you've—and you look at it on a year-over-year basis—you've seen load-to-truck ratio go up.
Yeah.
We're sitting at around five to one. You've seen tender rejections go up. You're sitting around six to one. But that's still not to the point where you're seeing spot loads. You typically start seeing spot loads at six to seven to one or double-digit increase. So, you know, when you take that into account and the fact that you are seeing rates go up on a year-over-year basis, we feel like you're coming off the bottom. What we're not sure of is the pace that you're coming off the bottom. And probably the place where we differ from a lot of our peers is, if you talked to us a year ago, we talked about this being a capacity problem. Today, we don't think it's as much a capacity problem as we do as we think it's more of a demand problem.
Capacity has been coming out for the last 2.5 years, but when you look at demand, we're below 2019 levels right now. You know, if we were to return to that, you would have enough capacity, and you would have the right amount of capacity for where we are. For us, we're looking more for what's going on on the demand side than the capacity side right now.
Okay. I guess, along the lines of demand, I think a theme we've heard from a number of folks over the course of the last, you know, kind of day and a half at the conference is that it appears that in the second quarter, maybe the worst-case scenario has been taken off the table. We had a lot of volatility and concerns coming out of April and the idea of tariffs being put in place. Obviously, some of those highest tariffs, particularly on China, have now come down. We're getting a little bit of stability, maybe some catch-up opportunity. Do you feel like that's a good characterization of what you're seeing in the market? We kind of take in some of the downside risk off. Maybe we haven't seen the upside, but we haven't seen the downside.
I think that that's fair. When you look at it, you definitely saw a little bit of an air pocket come April and early May.
Yeah.
Now it starts to happen whenever you saw the steamships, the blank sailing stop, containers are being ordered. You expect some sort of uplift as we start June, July, August coming back in for that. For us, the thing that we're watching is really what happens post that. I don't think that anybody's got a crystal ball to be able to say what happens with the market post that. What starts to look like a more normalized market when you have the air pocket and then you start to see a slight pickup in demand? What does it look like post that?
Okay. Yeah, and I'm guessing shippers aren't giving you too much information on what they're going to do at that point, right? A little bit too volatile for them to make a call?
I think it depends on which shipper you're talking about because, you know, right before we walked down here, I was on the phone with one of our customers, and we're hearing different things from every customer. I think, you know, there's not a consensus among shippers of everybody doing the same thing. Some shippers, for us, as you look at what happened, they kept ordering through the air pocket. Some tried to keep ordering but could not actually get capacity in the right way to be able to order through the air pocket, not from the steamship lines, but more from the manufacturers that were shut down during that process. Then we had some that slowed down ordering and some that stopped completely. Because there was not a unified strategy there, there's not a unified strategy on the other side.
Is there any way to differentiate between some of the end markets and areas where maybe there has been some relative strength?
Yeah, I think for us, you know, if you go back the last 12 months, technology industry has actually done well for us.
Yeah.
We expect that to continue to do well. Food and Bev has done all right. The place we've probably been hit the hardest has been more on the automotive side. Automotive for us, you know, in Q1 was down 26% on a year-over-year basis. You know, for us, that's some of our higher margin freight. We talked about that being around $10 million of gross margin impact for Q1.
Remind us, auto as a sort of portion of the book, whether you want to slice it on a revenue basis or a load basis.
If you look at it, within brokers, it can go anywhere depending on what's going on in the market, from high single digits to low teens as a percentage of the business. That's because one of our largest customers is ourself. When you look at our managed transportation, a good piece of the book is managed expedite freight, whenever you think about the OEMs doing expedite moves. That's something that's never a market share question. We've got the market there. It's more of what's going on and what's making its way to the expedite board. Right now, there's not a lot that's making its way to the expedite board because there's not a lot of tender rejections.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. I guess when we think about the rate environment, I think this is an interesting dynamic. We've heard from a number of carriers over the course of the last two days that we're in sort of a positive rate environment as we've gone through the tail end of bid season. I guess first question, does that sound right as far as what you guys are seeing? I guess maybe digging a bit deeper, and we talked a little bit about this a couple of days ago when we had the opportunity to sit down, seems like spot rates are still well below contract rates, but contract rates are still up a little bit on a year-over-year basis. Maybe there's not so much volume on the spot side. Can you comment on both of those pieces?
Yeah. For us in Q1, you saw that our truckload rates were up 4% when you exclude fuel and length of haul.
Yeah.
I think that's in line with what was going on in the market. We talked about in Q2 there being the implementation of the bids that have happened in Q4 and in Q1. When you look at the implementation of those bids, we talked about our contract rates being up, you know, low to mid-single digits for us on a year-over-year basis and feel good as we sit here today to be able to do that.
Okay.
We published the curve market study.
Yeah.
To that point, we released it a few weeks ago, Chris, and we talked about exactly what you're referring to, right, being an inflationary part of the freight cycle. I think that helps inform us in terms of what's going on in the market and consistent with the view that Drew just talked about with, you know, 2025 contract rates being up, low to mid-single digits year-over-year.
Keeping with sort of the industry discussion at that level, before we drill down a little deeper, there's been a lot of discussion about some of the things on capacity that can make it a little bit tighter. I know you talked about wanting to see demand come back, and that certainly makes sense. You know, you have English language proficiency. There's been some discussion of the sort of cabotage stuff going on down around the border with Mexican drivers coming over, taking loads that are not destined back for Mexico originally. You know, how do you think about that? What maybe is your view, if you have one, on what that does to the industry capacity?
I think it has a big impact if it goes into effect. I mean, this is something that's been a law for a long time. To me, it comes to the implementation of it.
Yeah.
Is this something that actually goes into effect? You know, we would watch the red states first because it is something that would happen at a state level. Does something happen in Texas? Does something happen in Florida? Does something happen in Tennessee, which are highly trafficked areas? If it does, you know, the numbers that we have heard could be anywhere to low double digits as a percentage of capacity. At that point, whenever you talk about demand returning, there is not as much capacity. You would see a sharper turn in the recovery at that point if that is where it were to take place.
What's interesting, Chris, is there's pretty significant coordination on behalf of the government agencies, right? If you look across the CVSA, DOT, FMCSA, where, you know, you think about implementing the executive order which goes into effect, I think 14 days from today, June 25th, you know, if the driver is deemed not to be proficient in English and or cannot interpret road signs, right, it's not just a simple fine, right? It is out of service as the penalty. You think about what the implication there is. To Drew's point, it could be significant, but it comes down to enforcement, which will be down at a state-by-state level.
That really speaks to regional dynamics. I think that's one thing I also wanted to get your take on. You guys obviously see the entire country and have good intel on all of that. You could maybe introduce a degree of incremental regional tightness in the Southwest or the Southeast as a result of some of this. Can you give us a sense of, are there markets right now that feel like they're better positioned than other ones going into this, meaning feeling a little bit tighter? Is the East okay? How about the West? You know, volume was a little soft in terms of imports, but maybe now coming back.
If you think of produce season, it's just working its way up the South to like.
Yeah.
If you go back six weeks ago, Florida was tight. You know, then Georgia's tight, then the Carolinas are tight, then it goes into Virginia. That's probably the biggest pocket of tightness that we're seeing right now is more related to what's going on on the produce side.
Okay. So that's really what's driving it. And then we'll see what happens with some of these incremental issues. Okay. That's very helpful. I guess maybe talking a little bit more specifically about 2Q and how you guys are sort of reacting into the market. I think spot rates have generally been relatively benign for the most part. We saw a little bit of a blip, maybe it was a two-week blip, extended blip around road check, but for the most part, it's been a little on the softer side. I guess as you think about that, that sort of matched what your expectations were, how you were thinking about kind of the market. Obviously, there was a lot of those concerns in April, so maybe it was. Just kind of curious your thoughts around how spot and how you're playing that.
I think you're right. There's not a lot of spot freight right now. Even in road check, you didn't hit the area where you were seeing a ton of tightness. You didn't see where you were seeing a ton of spots. It was tight, but you didn't see a ton of spots.
Yeah.
What that means is typically during that time period, it's actually compression on your gross profit per load because it's the contract loads. You know, before that, you saw the softness, so you're focusing on purchase transportation. With each week, going into road check, you can see road check lasts a week. You can see it lasts all the way to July 4th. You've started to see to where it has gotten back into a softer market coming back out of that.
Okay. So that's the right way to think about it still, just that continued sort of softness.
That's right.
Dynamic. Okay. That makes sense. I want to sort of focus in a little bit more on some RXO-specific dynamics, particularly on the Coyote side. We had the opportunity to spend a little bit more time with Coyote earlier this week, which I thought was extraordinarily helpful. I think it gave us some good context of what you guys are trying to accomplish. I guess maybe very high level, how do you feel like the integration process is going? Maybe kind of go through some of the key initiatives and timetables that you're thinking about and systems are being cut over now, and maybe there's some coming up in the next couple of months.
Yeah. I think first, whenever you're doing acquisition, you know, there's three things that we're looking at. We're looking at what happens with the people. We're an asset-light business, so it's about the people and having the relationships there to where they want to stay, they want to work with you. On the people side, director level and above, voluntary turnover sitting at around 4%. You know, I think the excitement that has come from the team of coming to an organization that knows and understands brokers, where they're a large piece, the center of what we're doing, we're bringing folks like yourself. They get excited about being able to have people come in and be a showcase facility for us. The second is on the customers. We saw over the last couple of years, Coyote's customers had taken a step back from them.
They had lost some volume, but they did not actually lose the customer. We viewed that as an opportunity to go in there and show what we can do from a service perspective to be able to build that back. We have got some good awards as we came in. There are some of their largest customers. They are actually up on a year-over-year basis coming out of that. The last piece is on the technology side. When you look at the technology, you know, for us, the biggest thing that we get off of that is if we can get the carrier reps on the same system, it is being able to purchase transportation better. We were able to do that on 5/1, and that was faster than what we originally modeled out. We are already seeing some early signs from purchase transportation.
We're seeing early signs of the two groups covering each other's freight, of putting the right truck on the right load. It helps with service and it helps with the purchase transportation side on that piece. The piece that has not gone as well as what we had hoped it would be is the gross profit per load on the legacy Coyote side. You know, when we looked at it, it has fallen more than what we thought it would for both Q4 and Q1. There was a weather impact that happened, but, you know, it's something that we've got to make sure that we get the gross profit per load back up to a healthy state for the long term, which we feel like we've got the opportunity and are addressing in the bids that are being implemented right now.
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that because I do think that that has been, you know, kind of a piece of the relative underperformance of EBITDA for the combined company as we've gone through the last couple of quarters. So where are we with that process? When do we feel like we're actually in the clear and kind of getting out of some of those contracts that maybe have been less favorable for you?
At the end of Q2, I mean, 75% of the bids that we do business with, they're implemented in Q2. As we get through Q2, you get past it on the rate environment. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, I mean, hopefully at some point in the near future, post that, you actually see a squeeze on your gross profit per load on the contract and you start to get to the other side of the spot. It doesn't mean that we're immune from the squeeze that would come at some point, but at Q2, you get past that. When you look at what we talked about, we've already taken out $50 million of cost.
Yeah.
We said that we would take out a total of more than $70 million in cash. We had been using the word at least. We're using the word more than. There is still some opportunity on there. On the technology side, we're there on the carrier cutover. We still have a little ways to go on the shipper. We're going different. The carrier cutover was a larger cutover so that we could start purchasing transportation together. On the customer side, we're going in buckets of going customer- by- customer so that we can make sure that it goes, the customers do not get interrupted from a service perspective of how we're looking at that.
When you think about the contracts that Coyote had that were less favorable as we've gone through the environment over the last several quarters, any way to size up what that has meant to sort of profitability of the business? Can we put a dollar figure on that from an EBITDA perspective or at least just sort of ballpark of kind of how you think about maybe some of the year-over-year declines?
I mean, what we've talked about is that the legacy Coyote Enterprise book, right? Because when you think about Coyote, it's across multiple different parts of the business.
Yeah.
You think about enterprise, middle market, small to medium business, and then UPS, right? When you think about the enterprise book, that's where the price in terms of revenue per load was lower relative to legacy RXO. We've talked about that being mid to high single digit percent. We've also talked about how price, when you think about the contribution margin within our brokerage business, every dollar of price generally will hit EBITDA at $0.70- $0.80 on the dollar, incremental and decremental. That gives a framework in terms of how to think about what Drew was describing earlier, where when you've got a contractual book of business and then you've got weather-related events that really tighten up the market, if you're certainly priced lower, you know, you'll feel that squeeze harder.
On the volume side, I think you made a good point in terms of still being on the contract with the shippers, but maybe at a lower volume level than where they had been before. It kind of leaves the door open for you, right? Instead of that, you know, you are saying I got a chance, kind of opportunity for you guys. Right.
We're seeing that in the bids that we're implementing right now.
Yeah.
Like, you know, some of the customers last year that were uncertain what was going to happen, where the business were going to land, some of their largest customers, the awards are up by a good amount on a year-over-year basis. Now we've got to see the volume materialize.
Yeah. Sure.
They have to be able to hit the projections that they're hitting, and then we have to be able to service the volume that they're giving us.
Yeah. Okay. I guess, you know, obviously volume was still down in the first quarter. I think the general expectation is you're still some headwinds on a year-over-year basis for volume for you guys in 2Q. I guess anything, I'm not expecting a mid-quarter update in that respect, but I guess can you just talk a little bit about sort of the cadence of volume? Is there a point this year, even without a more material sort of uptick in overall macro or demand trends, that you get into a much better spot from a volume standpoint year-over-year?
We talked about our expectation that for the combined company, we're able to grow volume year-over-year, right? You look at Q1, we were down 1% year-over-year. We talked about in the month of April, we were up slightly year-over-year, certainly driven by our LTL strength, where LTL volumes were up 26% year-over-year in the first quarter, right? I think your question was probably more towards.
More truckloads.
More truckload oriented, right? I think the biggest determining factor there is going to be what's happening in the market, right? Our awards are up on both a rate standpoint and from a volume standpoint in many cases, but the question is, you know, what we call internally fill rates, right? What are the fill rates on those awards? That's really going to be a function of the market.
Yeah. I would add on to what Jared said. I mean, if you look at Q1, take just the truckload piece. Legacy Coyote was down 9%. Legacy RXO was down 7%. Legacy Coyote was not totally unexpected. Like we saw the volume and how it was trending from where it was going, and we knew the awards that they had in place. If there were not spots, that is exactly where we would have expected. The gross profit was not where we expected it. On legacy RXO, with legacy RXO being down 7%, Coyote did not really have any automotive business, but legacy RXO did. That business was down 26% on a year-over-year basis. When you look at the biggest driver for that, it was on the automotive side.
Okay. If auto is in sort of the mid-teens or low double digits, that's kind of the right way to think about it. That portion of the business down 26%.
That's right.
A big driver of that down 7% for the quarter. Got it. Okay. As we think about some of the technology, you mentioned the cutover on the carrier side. I think that's an interesting dynamic and want to talk a little bit about the purchase trans opportunity that you think you have as a result of that. Can we talk a little bit about what you've been able to accomplish? I know it's relatively recent that you cut over. I think it was in May, so we're only a month or so into this process, but sort of what are the early returns?
May 1st, we were able to go ahead and complete carrier and coverage transition. What that means is, and that's to your point, you know, call it 3-6 months ahead of when we expected that to be done, right? Where ultimately now we have every carrier rep across the org, whether or not you're a legacy RXO or legacy Coyote carrier rep, you are all covering freight within freight optimizer. You know, the orders to the team were clearly, let's get this up and running, prove the scalability and the resilience of the platform, right? Investing in the cloud, getting all of that done ahead of time to make sure that when that cutover occurred, we were covering freight. That was a check mark. Like that was the biggest thing that needed to get done.
This was what I would say the most complex part of the technology integration, right? With that behind us, you know, the technology integration has been materially de-risked. That allows us to get on one platform and then start benefiting from purchase transportation opportunities when we think about savings. $4 billion + combined pool of purchase transportation dollars across legacy RXO and legacy Coyote brokerage last year. The framework that we've provided is, you know, a 1% savings, which we think is a good way to think about it, would equate to about a $40 million savings on cost of purchase transportation. I think the only other thing I'd add is that, you know, this is, and we're already seeing some early wins, right?
I think we talked about this on the earnings call where crossbooks in terms of legacy RXO covering legacy Coyote freight and vice versa were already north of 20%. Continuing to see progress there, getting to learn the systems, getting everyone's screens in order and, you know, learning the intricacies of freight optimizer. The only thing I'd close with is that, you know, this is a relative concept, right? It depends on where the market is. Are we buying better relative to market? If the market's tightening, right, we would be buying better relative to how we would be standalone. It's more about cost avoidance. When the market loosens again, we'll be able to pull down cost of purchase transportation very quickly.
The $40 million not included at all in the $70 million+ that you guys have talked about from a synergy perspective. That is incremental. I think from a timing standpoint, you guys are talking more about starting to realize those at the end of this year, beginning of next. Is that probably the right way to think about it?
To Jared's point, we're seeing some of it now.
Yeah.
Day one, week one, the only thing we wanted to do is make sure the systems work and make sure we were servicing the customer. We moved faster than what we expected. But, you know, I think as both groups become more familiar with each other's freight, it goes back to putting the right truck on the right load. You'll continue to see that. You know, as you start to exit the year and we set ourselves up for 2026, I think that's whenever you'll see the full benefit, but you'll continue to see it ramp up throughout the rest of this year.
It sounds like there's a little bit of a tail still on sort of the non-PT synergy side of it. I guess as you think about that and maybe the opportunity for some other cross-sell, you still are working on sort of the shipper side of it and kind of getting that piece over it. When does that all kind of start to work its way out?
If you think about on the tail on the SG&A identified synergies, right, we talked about realized in year impact 2025, about $45 million relative to the more than $60 million outlook that we gave for total SG&A synergies. You think about heading into 2026, there will be a net benefit of about at least more than $15 million as it relates to incremental costs that are coming out of the business, right? Obviously there are still inflationary pressures in the business, et cetera, that will clearly help offset and then some. Also heading into 2026, I think it is important to point out that on the capital expenditure front, we are going to have a material decline in CapEx.
CapEx will move lower by about, you know, call it $25 million year-over-year from more about $20 million from $70 million, which is the midpoint of our outlook here, of $65 million-$75 million in 2025, down to about $50 million in 2026 as we lap some of the Coyote CapEx that comes out and the expansion in our Charlotte facilities. One other thing I'd add there, and that's the beauty of the model in terms of the historical strong return on invested capital. Legacy RXO was spending about $40 million-$50 million in CapEx. Now pro forma, you think about what we're going to look like next year on a normalized basis, $50 million of CapEx. We more than doubled the size of our truckload volume with very little CapEx addition, which will speak to our long-term free cash flow generation.
One other point on some of the work that you're doing with the technology, retaining carriers in this initial cutover, have we seen anything from a carrier perspective?
Yeah. The good thing for the carriers now is the carriers have doubled the freight that they were looking at. So the carriers are absolutely, we've been retaining it because there wasn't a lot of carrier overlap. When you look at legacy Coyote, they were working with larger carriers and with private fleets more than we were, a lot more than we were. We were working with a lot of smaller carriers that they weren't working with. So, you know, for the carriers, it's been a huge benefit because they truly are getting a look at double the freight than what they were getting prior to this.
Okay. And then, you know, I wanted to talk about some of the financial targets. So I think for the second quarter, we're looking for $30 million-$40 million adjusted EBITDA. You know, any thoughts on sort of the variability within that range? Anything that we've seen that you want to kind of comment around the context of the second quarter EBITDA targets?
I can give you the framework in terms of how we outlined it for the second quarter because we wanted to be more prescriptive than usual, given to your point earlier, how fluid the environment is right now. You know, off of the April base, and we talked about that April base being subseasonal with volumes down mid-single digits sequentially. You know, we're talking about the high end of the guide requiring volume flattish from that subseasonal base and the low end of the guide having a big step down in volume. From a gross profit per load perspective, the high end of the guide would assume gross profit per load would be flattish from that. The low end of the guide would assume sort of the worst of both worlds, right? Where you would have a decline in volume and a squeeze, right?
We tried to capture what we thought was, you know, a pretty, while it's a larger range given the current environment, I think it takes into many of the considerations that occurred. Then on the last- mile business, last- mile is seasonally stronger into the second quarter. Last- mile has a tremendous amount of momentum continuing to outgrow the industry.
Okay. Nothing to be concerned about, at least on the last- mile side. I think in terms of the broader market, I guess there's maybe like a small amount of squeeze around road check or something like that, but not necessarily.
That's incorporated into the outlook.
Yeah. Okay. So not necessarily seeing anything from a, you know, from a market perspective that's overly concerning in that respect.
Not today.
Not today. Okay. That is a good answer. We will take it. And then cash flow, as we think about EBITDA conversion down to cash flow this year as we work through the rest of the year, we talked about obviously the CapEx piece coming down quite a bit as we move out beyond. Any thoughts around cash flow, you know, conversion 2 Q and then maybe back half of the year?
Yeah. Three main pieces. I'll just talk about the whole year in terms of how to think about 2025 adjusted free cash flow, right? We talked about our CapEx outlook of $65 million - $75 million, $70 million at the midpoint, our interest expense of about, you know, $32 million - $34 million in 2025. This year we talked about, you know, roughly $50 million - $60 million of cash outflows associated with the restructuring and integration expenses associated with legacy Coyote as we execute on the synergies, right? On a normalized basis, and this is, you know, the beauty of the financial model in terms of long-term free cash flow generation, you know, you think about covering your fixed costs with respect to capital expenditures of about $50 million a year and then interest expense of about $30 million- $35 million a year.
Anything above that EBITDA normalized for working capital will drop to the balance sheet at $0.75 on the dollar, which is adjusted for our long-term effective tax rate of about 25%. You know, you think about the ability for this organization to be putting up significantly larger amounts of EBITDA and those kind of fixed capital requirements, you know, there is a tremendous amount of free cash flow generation that can hit the balance sheet.
Do we think about the cash costs associated with Coyote synergies? Is that relatively well contained in 2025?
Yes. Absolutely.
You would expect to see that as a?
This will be the largest outflow as it relates to cash associated with the Coyote synergies. When you think about the math on that, Chris, I mean, I think Drew alluded to this earlier, $70 million, more than $70 million of cash synergies, right? $60 million OPEX, $10 million CapEx. We'll spend about $50 million in total to achieve that. More than 150% return. Yes, this will be the biggest outflow associated with Coyote will be 2025.
Okay. Okay. Helpful. Drew, I wanted to get your perspective on the industry to some extent. I think it's been very interesting to see sort of how it's played out. We've gone through, you know, I think one of your competitors was on stage talking about, I think, 38 months of a freight downturn. It's been a long time. But who's counting, I guess? We've seen some exits from the market. We've seen capacity beginning to come out. Maybe starting there, what have you seen in terms of brokerage capacity? It feels like that's coming out at least a little bit of a faster clip than maybe actual truckload capacity.
I think if you look over the last two years, 20% of brokerages have gone out of business. You know, when you start to think about it longer term, you hear a lot about how fragmented the brokerage industry is. And it is. There are 17,000 truck brokerages out there. The moat to get into the brokerage industry is not hard. You can decide, hey, I do not want to work for Wells Fargo today and go home and start a brokerage if you would like to. The moat around creating a large-scale brokerage that invests in technology that has been able to service customers at a large scale is very, very wide. There are only a handful of companies that can do that.
Okay. I guess if you think about that dynamic with capacity coming out, do we still feel like the growth above the truckload market is still the opportunity for the industry? Obviously it sounds like you feel very good about your ability within that, but does brokerage grow faster than truckload?
I think through a cycle, yes.
Yeah.
You know, the down part of the cycle, probably not. You probably are trying to hold serve or even go down a little bit. Through a cycle, absolutely. I think you've seen it go, you know, whenever I've started, I've said this many times, whenever I started, I think it was 6% was the brokerage of the for-hire industry. Now, you know, it's more than 20%. I think as we look out, 3-5 years, you're going to see it become more than 30%. I think you can see it getting to the 40% longer term.
Okay. So there still is that opportunity. Obviously, you have the opportunity to grow within that. I guess I'm curious about your thoughts in competitive dynamics around gross profit margin. I think there was a period of time where we saw sort of, you know, tech disruptors enter the market, maybe potentially try to squeeze gross profit margin in the goal or hopeful goal of generating market share. How do you feel? Has that stabilized to a degree? I know we're not in a good part of the cycle, so maybe we need to see how it plays out over the next several years. Do you feel like the market's changed a bit?
I don't in that sense. I think that you're right that there were some people who came into the industry and used price as a disruptor. But, you know, the one thing that I think that was found out is whenever you use price, customers who let you in on price will throw you out on price. Yeah, and then servicing the business that you have, it is easy to go in there and say, hey, I'm going to lead on price and I'll need 100 loads per day. But the first time that you only pick up 50, 75 for a large tier one customer, you don't make it today to be able to service the freight. So, you know, I think that from that aspect, I've seen that over my 20 years of people using price to land business.
Our goal has always been to identify where the market is and then be able to find the right truck for the right load at a fair margin.
I want to talk about final-m ile a little bit. I think it's an interesting business. I think you've talked about strength opportunities there. Can we just get a little quick update on final-m ile, what you're seeing there and maybe how that progresses throughout the rest of the year?
Yeah. I mean, we're the largest player in big and bulky home delivery goods, and we have been for a very, very long time. We've got a national footprint to where, you know, when customers have home deliveries and they're doing it on a national scale, they generally start their conversations with us. These large customers, a lot of times they award you in a market area. For us, we've seen these customers that we've had good service with, we've created solutions with over a period of time, they're awarding us new markets. Our existing customers are giving us new markets of business. The second piece is because we have scale, because we have facilities that put us within 120 mi of 90% of the U.S. population, we've got a pretty good pipeline that we've done well on.
The third piece is Coyote had customers that were not doing last- mile business with us, and we've been able to turn some of them on very, very quickly. That is what led us in the last- mile industry that was going down last quarter on a year-over-year basis to be able to grow stops by 24% on a year-over-year basis.
You could see, you know, I guess as you're getting more market share from your existing customers, even with some of the headwinds that we kind of hear and some of the big bulky stuff, that you feel like the growth rate or the opportunity out there is still pretty solid for you in that business?
I think for the foreseeable future, we still have good opportunity for growth with existing and with new customers.
Is there anything else to do there in terms of either M&A or something in that? I mean, or is it just all achievable from an organic perspective?
Right now we're thinking about it more organically on last- mile. That's not to say that we wouldn't do something in M&A. I think you always look at things that make you a better company long term. We're the industry leader in there. When we're taking business organically, that's sometimes a lot cheaper than doing it through M&A.
Yeah. Yeah. As we're wrapping up here, a couple of quick questions I wanted to kind of run through just to clean up seasonality for the rest of the year. Just want to make sure we're kind of clear on that. I think you guys have historically said 2Q and 4Q can kind of be the bigger quarters for you guys. 3Q is probably somewhere there. I guess 4Q is largely peak season dependent, I guess. Anything to add there? That's probably the right way to think about it.
No, I think that sums it up nicely where 2Q and 4Q are our seasonally strongest quarters, especially for our last mile business. As you think from Q2 - Q3, last- mile is seasonally weaker. From Q3 - Q4, as we talked about, it is seasonally stronger. From Q2 - Q3, you have the tailwinds on the brokerage side in terms of the full run rate impact of the contracts that we were talking about earlier. I think the big unknown is what is happening with industry-wide volumes, right? How to think about industry-wide volumes and what that means relative to market conditions. Is there a squeeze or do things get loosened up, right? In terms of Q4.
If they loosen up, how quickly can you pull the purchase trends down?
Exactly. And then, you know, will this be the fourth year in a row of no peak, or will we actually have a robust peak? You tell me.
It's a good question. Not sure I know the answer. LTL, that has been a big growth area for you guys. I guess quickly, any thoughts in terms of, you know, it's interesting to see how strong LTL has been generally for brokerage companies as opposed to overall LTL volumes. Any way to kind of understand the discrepancy with what you guys see with as big a growth versus, you know, maybe the mid to high single digit declines we're seeing from the big LTL carriers?
For us as customers that we started the relationship with on the full truckload side. These are large, 114,000 companies that when you look at their spend, LTL is a very small piece of their overall spend. It may be $5 million, it may be $20 million of their overall spend. When you look at their time and you think of lost shipments, of claims, of damages, it is a bigger piece of their time than what they are actually spending on truckload, which is a bigger piece of their spend.
The way that we've been winning is by, you know, outsourced deals or outsource of a piece of a deal or a certain market on the LTL side with large enterprise customers who are used to our system, who have been doing business, who understand our solutions and are saying, hey, can you become an easy button for us on the LTL?
Is there maybe a bit of a price arbitrage that you can provide to your customers to some degree where you guys buy a little bit more favorably, so maybe not hitting those same large rate increases on the contract side that we hear so much about from the LTL carriers?
We're working with the national players and we're working with regional players. I think when you start to look at that, a large enterprise customer may just be working with the national players. When you can start to bring them more solutions, more opportunities, of course there's something there on that piece. You know, for us, the reason that we like the LTL business so much is because it is stability. Truckload, you can see big movements in gross profit per load. You know, we've said this before that for every dollar gross profit per load moves on an annualized basis, there's more than a $1 million impact to EBITDA. It's not just like a million, $1.1 million. Like it's a good bit more than a $1 million impact for us. LTL is a pretty stable EBITDA piece of business.
It is a stable gross profit per load. If you look at the chart, like a little bit of movement, but like it roughly stays flat for where it is. For us, as we look to not just what happens in the next upcycle, which we spent time talking about, we also look at what are things that we can do for the next down cycle to have more stability and raise the floor on where EBITDA is for the next down cycle.
LTL is part of that.
LTL and managed trends are the two biggest parts of that.
Got it. I guess sort of lastly, as we're wrapping up here, you noted the leverage of the business and the cash flow generation, CapEx coming down as we think about next year. You know, leverage is around 2x , so nothing crazy in that respect. But what do you think about in terms of use of cash? That's going to be, you're going to go from a scenario where you issued a bunch of equity for the transaction, but you're going to start to generate a lot of cash. Is it, you know, paying down some incremental debt, some buyback of shares? How do you think about it?
Yeah, I think it's being opportunistic and doing the right thing. It's looking at what's best for shareholders for the long term. Is there a deal that's highly accretive that makes sense? That's something we should do. Is it something that you should look at using the $125 million authorization of share buybacks that we've got? It's looking at what's right for the next three, four, five years for us.
Okay. That makes sense. Some gentlemen, thank you very much. We've covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. I really appreciate your time.
Absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Thanks, guys.