Patriot Transportation Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:PATI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matt McNulty: So yes, so we are currently at roughly 360 revenue producing drivers, from somewhere in the 350’s to start the year, so a slight improvement there. And as far as really kind of started seeing it mostly in the second half of January, which is fairly typical for the trucking industry and everybody stays put through the holidays, and then in January is when people start making changes. And so we’ve actually seen our drivers in training in the last couple of weeks up in the mid-30s whereas prior weeks before that, we were in the mid to upper 20s, so that’s it. So a leading indicator, we’ll see what happens, because they have to get through training and stick, but it certainly would be a positive trend if it continues.

John Koller: Okay, yes, some of the things I’ve been reading have been saying that the worker pool has been increasing, and I’m wondering if you’re seeing that too, but it sounds like seasonality might mask some of that.

Rob Sandlin: It does a little bit. We don’t see much movement in December, but the other thing that we’ve seen is that with spot freight prices coming down, we’ve seen some owner operators come back to the tank segment. And we’ve got more owner operators running today than we did when we began the fiscal year. And so we’re monitoring that and trying to make sure we keep that balance where we like it. So that’s a positive thing, because we’ve got freight for those folks to haul, so we’ll continue to monitor that and see what happens.

John Koller: Okay, great. And then just a quick question if I may on insurance. A lot of the stuff I read saying that the commercial vehicle, at least on the reinsurance segment is getting somewhat difficult or has been difficult to place, and I know you guys do self-insurance. But I’m just wondering where you come out on balancing the risks and the rewards with that? Wondering if there was a price at which you might think about producing your deductibles or anything like that?

Matt McNulty: I would say that right now we run those numbers, maybe not every year. We run them enough to know that there is a sizable seven figure gap between what we would spend if we were to lower our retention significantly versus what we are spending today in the premium plus our cost. So we’ve looked at it and so I don’t see us. We kind of feel like we are in the sweet spot on the risk and the work comp is something I guess. The work comp we decided to get a $0.5 million deductible a few years back and although we did have one claim that really surprised us last year, that still if you look at the math over history appears to be the right place to be for expenses on top of premium.

Rob Sandlin: It’s been a pretty hard market and so any movement in that with a lower deductible over the past three or four years would have been really expensive. And then to take on more risk, looking at it the other way, there really wasn’t the payback on the premium, again because of the hard market. You weren’t getting rewarded as much. So we’ve kind of stayed where we’ve been for a while in those groups, but it is something we continue to look at.

Rob Sandlin: Yeah, and our renewal this year was not €“ it was not terrible. It wasn’t like it had been in the last few years with everything being. You know our renewal on the primary was under 10% and kind of in that mid-teen range on the upper layers.