ORLANDO – Kevin Knight will tell you that he’s been through a lot of business cycle swings during his 33-year career in trucking, but nothing like what the industry is going through right now. Yet he also believes there is a silver lining somewhere in the economic downturn, a chance for truckers large and small to learn how to drive cost out of their operation and be more efficient.

“This downturn offers us an enormous opportunity to take notes, especially for the younger generation,” he said during a speech here at the Technology & Maintenance Council’s annual meeting. “It’s an opportunity for them to see what ‘difficult times’ really means – what happens when jobs disappear in an economic recession. What we’re going through now is like Hurricane Katrina. Yes it’s a big storm and will cause a lot of damage, but it will pass – and we will have to find a way to rebuild.”

Knight, chairman & CEO of truckload carrier Knight Transportation, noted that carriers need to both refocus on the fundamentals of running a business-- such as eliminating debt, insisting on profit, and watching cost-per-mile like hawks--while also concentrating on becoming “greener” in both the environmental and economic sense of the word.

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