Earlier this year, as regular readers and Overdrive Radio listeners will be aware, Oakridge Transport owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber achieved what might seem to be absolutely unachievable to anyone who’s ever owned and operated a Class 8 tractor. Kitzhaber’s 1995 Kenworth T600 passed the 4-million-mile mark on the odometer, and he’s been behind the wheel of that truck since it was brand-new — originally purchased by Millis Transfer where Kitzhaber found his first OTR home as a company driver.
A few short years later, he purchased the truck from Millis, and he’s owned it ever since. “I could not do that without having a top-notch approach to maintenance,” the owner said, noting his always-proactive method takes care of small problems before they became big ones on the long road past 4 million miles.
Coincidentally, he shares a maintenance partner with Overdrive‘s July Trucker of the Month, Mike Nichols, in JR Truck Repair and Fabrication.
JR Truck Repair’s Adam Pratt has owned the longstanding Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, shop since 2021, involved in trucking himself with a small fleet prior to that time. Owner-operator Kitzhaber’s relationship with JR goes back farther than Pratt’s ownership there, but the diesel fab specialist has been impressed by the owner-operator’s truly meticulous nature when it comes to preventive work. Kitzhaber’s truck was in the shop as Pratt spoke to Overdrive in mid-August, getting “new fuel lines put on,” among other work, Pratt said. “His philosophy is it’s cheaper to do it now rather than have to call in a tow truck and doing it on the road,” where you’re virtually guaranteed to spend “double the money.”
Owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber
He’s been taking the T600 to JR since April of 2002, and Pratt described a couple of different checklists Kitzhaber brings in, one a standard list and another, second one detailing all the items he wants inspected for problems. Both are about as thorough as it’s possible to be, according to Pratt. “His checklist takes four-six hours,” generally, Pratt said. He “never misses it, between every service.”
It’s hard to “get back the downtime” that comes with any OTR repair, Kitzhaber emphasized, and his diligence has paid off in a big way long-term. The owner, in his mid-60s, is planning retirement as early as Spring next year. He’s got an efficient, profitable trucking business and plenty of diligence around best practices to thank for it. For that and other reasons, Alan Kitzhaber is Overdrive‘s August Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running for the 2024 Trucker of the Year award.
[Related: Know your limitations, partner accordingly: Trucker of the Month Mike Nichols]
Overdrive‘s 2024 Trucker of the Year program, sponsored by Commercial Vehicle Group and Bostrom Seating, recognizes clear business acumen and unique or time-honored recipes for success among owner-operators. Through October, we’re naming Truckers of the Month to contend for the Trucker of the Year honor. Finalists will be named in December, and a winner crowned early next year. Nominations continue to be sought for exceptional owner-operators, whether leased or independent, throughout the year. Nominate your business or that of a fellow owner (up to three trucks) via this link for a chance to win a custom replica of your tractor and a Bostrom seat from Commercial Vehicle Group, among other perks.
A leg up on business with early management experience
Owner-operator Alan Kitzhaber managed a Radio Shack store location through the 1980s. There, he got a crack look at early personal computers and familiarity with spreadsheet software. When he finally got his CDL in 1991, around the age of 30, and took work as a company driver, it wasn’t with grand career ambitions. “I got into trucking thinking I would just do it for a couple of years just to see the country,” he said, “and then I would get a real job.”
Yet some decisions have a way of leading a man’s plans in unexpected directions.
He was employed by Millis Transfer out of Black River Falls, South Dakota, for the early part of his over-the-road career. By early 1995 he was fully ensconced in the driver’s seat of the Millis-owned Kenworth T600 he would spend the rest of his career piloting. He was a company driver at that time, and the Millis fleet was moving more into a business model of leasing on owner-operators, he said. He took an offer from the company to buy the truck, and took title of it in 1998.
[Related: 4 million miles of increasing efficiency for owner-op’s 1995 Kenworth T600]
The early retail work would prove plenty useful in the newly minted business.
“I have been keeping profit and loss statements in a spreadsheet for many, many years,” Kitzhaber said, learning a lot from longtime owner-op coach Kevin Rutherford and others. Rutherford once offered his network a sample profit/loss statement. Kitzhaber used it as a guide to build his own. He “was exposed to the [spreadsheet] software sooner than most people,” he said, through his Radio Shack work. What’s more, “running a retail business, an awful lot of that applied to running a trucking business.”
One of the “biggest problems many owner-operators have,” he said, is a willingness to treat trucking like it’s little more than a “hobby. … You’ve got to run it like a business, and not a hobby. Some folks combine the two, and that’s perfect.”
Principally for Kitzhaber, trucking has always been a vehicle, a tool to “get me somewhere else. I want to generate profit from it.” That extends to his long-running T600. “There’s no point in buying a new fancy tool” to get a job done “when the old one does it better than the new one.”
Trucking has delivered on his journey to that somewhere else. Namely, retirement will bring opportunity for numerous other projects/interests. Kitzhaber learned from his experience of transition between retail management and trucking when he’d “saved some money” for retirement and spent it, nearly wiping out his fairly good start on the long building project that is erecting a retirement nest egg, he said. Since then, “I’ve been consistently investing 15%-20% of my income” every single year. “Doing that over time gets you where you want to go.”
Kitzhaber has three separate qualified retirement accounts: a traditional IRA, a SIMPLE IRA, and a Roth IRA, the last of which he views as a key component of managing income tax in retirement itself, given proceeds from that account can be withdrawn tax-free. Kitzhaber also maintains a health savings account for tax-free saving for health expenditures and two individual savings accounts, all managed in part with a trusted financial advisor.
“It’s not market timing” that gets you in a position to retire, Kitzhaber said, summarizing financial advisors’ advice, “it’s time in the market.” As with his maintenance program through the years, “I’ve been very disciplined about that,” too.
[Related: There’s no better time than now to financially prep for retirement]
“If you can’t take a 50% decline in the market” with calm, he added, you won’t get where you want to go. “It’s very important you stay the course.” Like as not, after such a market crash, “the next day it goes up 10%” or more. “We saw that in 2008 and 2009. A lot of people couldn’t stand it and got out, and didn’t want to get back in.”
In his view: “Trust history as your guide that things are going to work out.”
In some ways, he’s taken a similarly steady-as-she-goes approach to long-term business partners in trucking, not just on the maintenance side with JR Truck Repair and his equipment.
Road to authority, serving a single shipper
After purchasing the T600 in 1998, Kitzhaber would remain leased to Millis Transfer for the better part of the next decade, excepting a summer in 2002 when he shifted to the household-goods-moving operation of United Van Lines, realizing in short order it wasn’t for him. “I went back to Millis,” he said, and was beginning to hear about coming emissions mandates and shifting diesel technology as a result. With worry over those impacts and the dot-com bubble bursting earlier, owner-operator Kitzhaber stayed the course with his 1995 T600, settling in for the long term.
“When I bought the truck,” he added, “I figured when I got it paid for I’d buy another one,” but with the economy as it was around the turn of the century “I just didn’t feel comfortable with the large payments a new truck would bring me.”
With the emissions mandates, “all you heard was bad,” he said.
“Maybe let’s just stick with the truck I’ve got,” he told himself. As time went on, talk around emissions just got more and more negative. His four cousins in the business, employed by Rihm Kenworth, told him of his truck, “You’ve got a good one.”
“Hopefully it’ll last until I retire,” he said.
[Related: ‘Not gonna be a guinea pig’: Owner-operators wary of EPA 2027 emissions]
As the years went by at Millis, the company seemed to be moving back toward more company equipment. “There seemed to be fewer owner-operators” like him there, Kitzhaber said. In 2009, with the Great Recession ongoing, his lease was up and he made a move to Transport Designs, headquartered in Savage, Minnesota, where he stayed for going on two years. That was when he heard about a shift in the transport operation of Menard’s, a home improvement retailer headquartered where owner-operator Kitzhaber lives to this day in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Previously, the company hired their own company drivers for shorter deliveries, “and they needed people to do longer runs,” Kitzhaber said, often contracting that work out to other fleets. They worked with owner-operators at the time, but Kitzhaber noted they had begun to put more emphasis on catering to independents then, where they got better service. He started hauling within the company’s network in 2010.
“That’s the business model they’ve been using,” Kitzhaber said, for the 14 years he’s pulled for them with his own authority.
He’d done the math before making the switch. One plus, of course: “It’s close to home,” he said. He compared what he “thought I’d make doing this versus a common carrier lease. It looked like I was going to take a pay cut, but I’d be home on a more regular basis.” It started out as a compromise that the owner was willing to make, but what he soon discovered was that he made more money with more regular freight. It was certainly a “pleasant surprise.”
[Related: Direct freight: Delivering a modicum of consistency in a turbulent market]
Kitzhaber’s T600, hooked to a specialty trailer in Menard’s stable.
Custom mods, with maximum efficiency in mind
As was highlighted in this July edition of Overdrive Radio featuring plenty of detail about custom mods to Kitzhaber’s long-running T600, “some guys customize their truck via paint, chrome, lights, and things like that,” he said. “I customize my truck to make it a more comfortable place to be, a more profitable truck, a more efficient truck.”
There’s a lot he’s done over to years, some of it satisfying both comfort and profitability goals, like auxiliary power devices for parked in-cab climate control and electrical power. Installation of those followed “one of the first things” he did to the truck, Kitzhaber said. Namely, he added a venting system like “RVs have,” he said, “with fans in them” in the sleeper area to circulate fresh air, with screens for the windows, cutting down on idle time when conditions allowed.
Otherwise, today Kitzhaber uses a Thermo King TriPac auxiliary power unit for air-conditioning in summer, both it and a Proheat diesel-fired heater, which serves to warm coolant in the winter and heat the cab, run on fuel stored in an auxiliary 14-gallon tank. “There’s a tax advantage to doing that” in the form of a tax credit, he said. “I can use No. 1 or highly treated diesel that’s not going to gel up on me” in the winter.
An Arctic Fox in-line fuel heater has helped him save on winter anti-gel treatments for his central fuel tanks, meanwhile. “That’s huge in the winter,” he said.
Enter your business in Overdrive‘s Trucker of the Year competition for a chance to win a seat from program sponsor Bostrom Seating, among other perks and prizes.
[Related: Small Fleet Champ Larry Limp and team take DIY maintenance to new levels]
Since that first engine overhaul, he did another at 2.4 million miles after a liner seal failed, then again at 3.6 million miles when the head gasket went, each time performing the work through a Cat-authorized shop that would warrant the work.
Other mods include:
- A fuel preparator that removes air;
- The OPS bypass oil filtration system, allowing for his extended drains at 50,000 miles, changing the filter every 25,000 miles;
- The PressurePro tire pressure monitoring system;
- An automatic greasing system by Groeneveld;
- A power inverter, microwave and television in-cab;
- Dashcam, which has “saved my butt a couple of times,’ he said, once after an attempted hit and run.
More than 10 years ago now, too, he converted from the traditional “twin-screw axle to a single drive axle with a tag axle,” reducing weight of the T600 by 1,200 pounds and improving fuel economy.
[Related: Odyssey past 10 mpg to max efficiency, in more ways than one]
The Cat-powered T600 has averaged 6.93 miles per gallon over the last 10 years, Kitzhaber said. “The last five years haven’t been as high as he’d gotten in the past, in part given the freight he’s been hauling for Menard’s on specialty trailers (see pictures above) — they’re almost like pulling a car-haul trailer in terms of aerodynamic drag, he notes.
But back when he was moving with dry vans and the occasional flatbed, in the 2013-’14 time frame, he “got this bug” to really push the envelope on fuel economy, to see what was achievable. He set his cruise speed to 57 mph and topped 8 mpg in 2013, then just shy of it the next year.
Since that time period, he’s been “driving a little faster” with time efficiency in mind, he said, ever with a focus on the cost-benefit calculation. Sometimes, of course, if you “drive slower you can’t get the load delivered” on time. “You have to do the math on it and see what works best” for bedrock profit.
Kitzhaber’s meticulous nature when it comes to managing the business has served him well, with a big retirement nest egg set to deliver a new chapter in the owner-operator’s life in the new year. “Come January I will have driven the same truck for 30 years,” he said, and in March he will have been a truck operator for 34. That feels like a “good timeline for me to wrap it up.”
He’s got clear projects in mind, meanwhile, with 40 acres of wooded land near a lake, with plans to build a house on it. He’s active with local taxidermy organizations, meanwhile, and is an avid photographer and videographer, a woodworker, all of which he’ll pursue with greater focus.
May was a big month for the owner. That month he celebrated with family the graduation of one of his brothers with a master’s degree in counseling. That brother’s son, then, with the completion of a PhD in chemistry and the graduation of the brother’s daughter from high school. Owner-operator Kitzhaber himself, treated for prostate cancer earlier in the year, was celebrating an undetectable blood test marking his freedom from that condition. He put a light blue ribbon in the icing on this brownie cake he made marking his passing 4 million miles as they all got together at his brother’s house to celebrate.
Enter your own or another deserving owner’s business (up to 3 trucks) in Overdrive‘s 2024 Trucker of the Year competition via this link.
Hear interviews with this year’s Truckers of the Month via the Overdrive Radio playlist below.