Spring 2025
Business Update
Greetings Oak Harbor Team,
Spring is in the air and the weather is warming up. Typically, this also means our business volumes start picking up. This year appears to be no exception; we are starting to get into our busier season where we can shine. Our customers choose Oak Harbor Freight Lines because of our ability to consistently deliver on time and damage free. Not just in the slow times, but in the busy summer months as well. We look forward to delivering that peace of mind to our customers once again throughout 2025.
2025 Goals
I do want to take a quick minute and touch base with you all on how the company is performing out the gates for 2025. Also want to make everyone aware of our goals for the year so we can check in on our progress each quarter.
This is a fairly lengthy list of goals, but it incorporates all the facets of our business and all departments in some capacity. Some of them we are currently hitting, like our bill count goal and time loss reduction. Some we are not performing early on where we need to improve, like our revenue and profitability improvements. We should all be striving to improve our own work performance, department, or terminal which will ultimately help the company as a whole. A high tide raises all the boats, as my Father told me many times.
- Increase Bill Count by 5%
- Increase Revenue without Fuel by 9%
- Reduce Operating Ratio by 1%
- Reduce Labor Cost as a Percent of Revenue by 0.5%
- Reduce our Turnover for Employees under 1 year tenure by 5%
- Improve our CSA Maintenance Score to a 60 or below.
- Improve our CSA HazMat Score to a 50 or below.
- Reduce our Time Loss Claims by 10%.
- Improve our Customer Survey Score from 4 stars to 4.5 stars.
- Complete the Implementation of Bill Trust Phase 2 and RouteMax Phase 2.
- Incur Zero Responsible Environmental nor Legal Actions.
KPI - Up Close
Lets take a closer look at some of the KPIs that really driver company performance through the first quarter.
Bill Count
Up 6.27% year over year. Interestingly though, nearly all of our growth have from our SC and CN regions. The PNW as a whole is very soft on outbound shipment count. Balancing ourselves out more is key to continued success in our world.
On-Time Service
Improved from 95.61% last year to 96.79% this year. Typically, in our industry as carriers get busier, service deteriorates. Not so the case for us, with our bill count growth we have also improved our service. This is a great sign.
Operating Ratio
We have moved backwards on this measurement. Q1 2025 we operated at a 97.45% compared to 96.56% for Q1 2024. This movement comes from some weather spikes we incurred driving our efficiency down, as well as the number of empty miles we are running as a result of our increased imbalance. The shipment volumes we are seeing in Q2 so far will allow us to make up the difference here if we perform well and hit our efficiency metrics.
New Terminal - Patterson
Lastly, I want to hit on a major win for the company. At the end of March this year we opened up our 41st terminal as a company in Patterson, CA. This terminal is running smoothly and creating opportunities for us to load more pure trailers earlier in those shipments cycle.
The day we opened that terminal my Uncle Ed reminded me that when he first started with the company, many years ago, we had three terminals. These terminals were in Seattle, WA, Bellingham, WA, and Oak Harbor, WA. God has blessed this company with amazing individuals that have made all of our growth and success a possibility.
As a family we cannot thank you enough for the hard work performed on a daily basis to make our companies goals and dreams a reality. Where we go from here remains to be seen, we have expanded a good chunk in the last 3-4 years and now we need to fill up all of this capacity with freight.
God Bless,
Eric Vander Pol
