April 2022 Business Update
Contributed by Dan Vander Pol, Co-President
We had a very successful first quarter coming in at 95.04% OR compared to 95.77% OR for the first quarter of last year. We are happy to provide a bonus check to all eligible employees due to this result, and are so thankful for the people that work for our company.
As you see every day, costs are increasing at a very rapid pace and Oak Harbor suppliers are passing costs along. We have seen huge increases (up to 35%) in truck and trailer costs, tire costs, DEF costs, propane costs and IT costs. We continue to stay ahead of the game by increasing our rates and being more productive with our time.
While our on-time percent has struggled a bit compared to past years, we are still head and shoulders above the competition, which allows us to receive increases from customer and bring on desirable freight.
Ryan Tarone joined us back on March 7th to lead our team in Las Vegas. We are excited to have him. Ryan will be kept busy as Vegas will be moving twice in the next year. We are being forced to leave our current home, and had to find an interim facility until we could get into a more long-term solution in Las Vegas. We are grateful to have a good leader to help us through this transition.
We look forward to a great 2nd quarter as business levels, and our pricing environment, remain strong. We will be in an excellent position to win more freight from current customers, as we increase our footprint and become a premium service, 7 state LTL carrier. Thank you for all you do for Oak Harbor and keep up the great work!
I was able to spend the day with our Phoenix team and am very encouraged by the attitude and culture that Gerry Martinez has created there. We will be using what we learned with the opening of Phoenix to make our opening of SLC even smoother. Phoenix business continues to increase at a sustainable pace, and they will likely be a group 1 terminal in the next year or 2.
Upcoming Projects
We are almost finished with the 16-door addition to Pasco. This will allow us to increase business and run more break bulk freight through that terminal. The new Redding terminal has had the foundation poured and should be completed by mid-July. The paving project in Portland continues to roll on and we are hoping for a late Spring/early Summer finish.
The other big projects we have going on are new terminals in Patterson, CA and Olympia, WA. We have secured land for both and are going through the due diligence to get the building permit. Patterson is ahead of Olympia and will hopefully break ground on it this year. Olympia will still be at least a year out before we are able to break ground.
Onto the opening of our Salt Lake City terminal, we now have Tim Hadley on board to lead the new SLC team. We are starting to gain some traction with finding employees for that terminal and after a lot of work by Tom Miller and Joel Spencer, the facility is almost all fixed up and ready to operate out of.
