Hotshot trucking to real driver support: Owner-op’s second chance

This week’s Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole’s talk with our July Trucker of the Month. Based just outside Baltimore, owner-operator Jeffrey Crise runs open-deck freight, often out of the port there and, as Cole wrote in his story late last month, the owner’s smack dab in the middle of a business fresh start. 

Care to hazard a guess how the Crise name is pronounced? He and I had a little bit of laugh over that this past weekend as I was putting the episode together. 

It’s not like crease, but a different, quite familiar word. Jeffrey Cries, like a baby. Yet owner-operator Crise is nonetheless quick with a little chuckle remembering his first decade-plus-long run at a small fleet. 

Plenty other folks got a smile out of his company name and insignia on the doors during his first run at a small fleet. “People loved it,” he said of the Hot Shootin’s Haulin logo on the sleeper of his units.

The name of the biz nodded to his start with an F-450 hotshot more than a decade ago, growing to five units and drivers at its high point before tough conditions drove him to shutter the operation just a couple years ago now. 

[Related: Promises made, promises kept: Trucker of the Month Jeffrey Crise]

He’s back to hotshot flatbed work now, pulling himself mostly with a Ram 3500, but likewise a Pete 579 now with a driver employed and at the wheel. His drive to push toward trucking success responds to improving conditions after just eight months away from the road.

He could have just retired, he said, but past failures didn’t sit well with him — he knew opportunity was knocking when freight markets looked like they were turning in 2025.

Overdrive Radio’s sponsor is Howes, longtime provider of fuel treatments like its Howes Diesel Treat anti-gel and Lifeline rescue treatment to get you through the coldest temps, likewise its all-weather Diesel Defender and Howes Multipurpose penetrating oil, among other products.And Crise had learned plenty along the way, of course, maintained freight contacts with both familiar brokers and direct customers in the interim, all built on past performance — bedrock on-time delivery and consistent communication, he stressed.

If you take one thing from owner-operator Jeffrey Crise’s experience — I hope particularly the multi-truck current and aspiring owners here can really feel the energy behind a top goal of his, to truly serve the drivers, serve them better than he did with the prior version of his fleet. 

He’s feeling good about prospects for this year, he said, despite challenges all small businesses face on the path to growth:

There’s stll time to get your own business, or that of another owner you admire, in the running for the 2026. We’ve got three more Trucker of the Month semi-finalists coming through October. Make a nomination, or enter your own 1-to-3-truck business, at OverdriveOnline.com/TopTrucker.

[Related: Hedge against bad brokers: Trucker of the Month insists on cash before unload]