The Quiet Collapse in Construction No One’s Talking About With Hunter Kosar – RFP 68 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:05): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Hunter Kosar. Hunter is owner and president of Twisted Nail Sand and Gravel, one of Texas’s fastest growing truck brokerage service companies. On the podcast, we discuss his path from investment banking to trucking and construction. We take a deep dive into the state of the logistics industry, the most common pitfalls that are crushing profitable real estate developments, and why Hunter thinks the trucking industry is overdue for a shakeup. If you’re a developer, broker, or in the logistics industry, today’s podcast is well worth a listen. Hunter, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Hunter Kosar (01:02): Absolutely, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
From Investment Banking to Trucking
Gordon Lamphere (01:06): So what got you into trucking? I know you were in investment banking and you have all sorts of background that’s a non-traditional logistics background. So what got you into the trucking industry?
Hunter Kosar (01:21): Yeah, the trucking journey was a little bit interesting. I went to a lot of school to end up essentially buying a semi, which I could have done out of high school. But part of it is circumstance. I grew up in a family that is very heavily construction related, so it’s what I was around. And I’ve always felt that my entrepreneurial journey was going to need to leverage the people and the resources that are around me, more so than inventing something new.
When I got into my first job out of school, my job was to value businesses that were looking to sell. Not many of my peers were very interested in the construction markets, but I was. So I accepted any trucking company that came through, and I got to interview the owners and find out what worked well, what didn’t work well, and what they wished they had done differently.
At the same time, I was traveling back and forth to Waco. I was working up in Dallas, about an hour and a half away. My stepfather, who was a trucker, had all these papers all over his desk, and he was trying to figure out if he had made money or not. I just couldn’t believe that the industry norm was to accept a run and then hope that it made money, that you didn’t actually do the math to figure it out. So I gathered six months of his receipts and itemized them. I turned them into an income statement, and I made a little calculator for him to be able to bid his work.
In that process, I saw that there was a little bit of margin. I had been working in Dallas on these companies, and I thought, well, it’s not a big deal to buy one truck. So let’s just do it. I bought one truck, I hired a driver, I kept my job in Dallas, and I grew that up to about six before I was voluntold that a decision needed to be made. Then I transitioned into trucking full time. So my journey was not expected. It was more an opportunity that I saw in front of me, and I threw a little bit of resource and time at it and decided to try to make it something.
Seeing the Opportunity
Gordon Lamphere (03:34): And where did you really see that opportunity?
Hunter Kosar (03:38): I like to see areas of the market where I can bring something that the rest of the market isn’t bringing at the time. I saw a lot of opportunity in an industry that still has a very poor reputation, and in being a broker. In this particular part of the industry, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. You’re surrounded by sharks. And with my family being the people who were being employed by these sharks, I thought there has to be a better way than what they’re offering you. And if not, then what they’re offering seems pretty easy.
So that was mainly the opportunity I saw. The people who were powering the industry, who were literally delivering the material, without whom you couldn’t deliver it, were just not being treated very fairly. Brokers would tell them one thing and then do the complete opposite. So I said, if it’s that easy, I’ll just tell you what I’m going to do, and then I’ll do it. That’s easy enough.
I have a skill set that I don’t imagine a lot of people in aggregate hauling have. I’m very educated in finance and banking and the resources that are necessary to facilitate these large contracts. In the beginning, those were not that big of advantages. It was mostly effort. Are you willing to put in the amount of work required to get up under this truck and repair it in the middle of the Texas heat? But I knew that long term, if I stuck with it, I would eventually get to a place where the things I’d been training in, in my education and my upbringing, would allow me to shine. That has fortunately been the case. A lot of our strategic advantage has been in my negotiation, in the way I present myself in front of customers or banks, and in my ability to assemble banks to lend to an idea that isn’t just plug and play into their models.
Why Driver Aggregation Matters
Gordon Lamphere (05:37): Can you dive a little bit more into that? I know you mentioned driver aggregation, why that matters in the trucking industry, and the power of trucking networks.
Hunter Kosar (05:49): Sure. The trucking industry is very fragmented. When you have a fragmented industry, you have an intense amount of competition, and usually not in favor of the individual operators. It’s usually in favor of the larger companies that are hiring these individuals. When you’re trying to negotiate, a lot of negotiation is just leverage. Do I have the ability to walk away from this deal? If not, then we’re not really negotiating.
So my theory, which has proven to be somewhat true, is that if we all just stopped beating each other up on these rates, if I stopped treating you as a competitor and more as a resource that’s available to me, then maybe I could unify us. And if you trust me as a voice to negotiate for you, then I can get a much better deal than you would have gotten on your own. That’s true for the customer, because they don’t have to deal with 15 different individual providers for one service. They just have to deal with me. And it’s true for the provider of the service. They don’t have to take a contract that was just put in front of them and accept it whether it’s profitable or not. They have somebody on their side who is doing the math, who’s coming up with what this run should actually bid, and who’s making sure their company is operating above board and as one unit.
So when I go and negotiate, I’m not negotiating with five trucks. I’m negotiating with the power of 50 or 60 trucks. I’m negotiating as one of the largest players in the market, but I have no trucks myself anymore. That’s why that assembly is important. If you have 50 people telling you no, it’s a lot harder to tell them they’re wrong than if you have one person telling you no, because then you just go to the next person on the list. I tell the truckers, I’m trying to unionize y’all without being a union. At its core, a union takes all these individuals with common wants, desires, and needs and makes sure they have one unified voice, that they’re standing together. They’re not at each other’s throats saying, okay, I’ll take a dollar less to be on that. We’re all saying no. If that means we’re all sitting, we’re all sitting, because we know that material does not move without us in the equation.
Hunter Kosar (08:09): It’s a concept that makes a lot of sense on paper. It’s very hard to get people to buy into it, because in the real world, much like the market right now, these are real people with real bills who really have to put food on the table. So it’s a sensitive spot being in the brokerage industry, being in the middle, because you have to weather all seasons of what both sides of your customers are willing to bear.
A good example is right now. Quite a few of these trucks, even though they appreciate not having to negotiate as individuals, have had a very long winter given where the economy is. In our specific part of the market, it’s been very rainy. A lot of operators are getting quite desperate, and you start to see that unionization of the trucks dissipate as their requirements become more and more immediate.
I tend to fit well with both sides of the market, but our volume does drop significantly whenever we have to convince a truck, “I know you have consistent work over there, but why don’t you take this much higher paying work with better working conditions over here?” When you’re worried about where your next meal comes from, or whether you can make your next truck payment, it doesn’t matter what the individual day does. What matters is, can I keep myself booked long term? The rest of the market can figure it out for themselves.
So there’s a positive and a negative to bringing that group voice together, but overall it’s tremendously positive. The trucks that do stay with us are operating at living wages. They’re able not only to improve the equipment they have but to add equipment to their fleets. So long term, I’m very, very convinced that if you’re an operator in the industry, your voice needs to be part of a bigger voice. As an individual, it becomes very difficult to stand on your own two feet and make your presence known when your competition is 10, 15, 20 times larger than you and has that much more in resources available.
The Value in Dirt
Gordon Lamphere (10:20): You mentioned a number of market dynamics. Is there a product you focus on primarily in the market?
Hunter Kosar (10:34): Most of what we focus on is the delivery or sourcing of regional aggregates that go into large-scale commercial projects, or even your local driveway. There’s a lot of value in dirt, and a lot of unknown value in dirt. You can really bankrupt a project by not estimating your dirt correctly, and a lot of that is tied up in the logistics of the dirt. So the service we’re offering is not necessarily a tangible.
You come to me as my customer, and a general contractor will have a purchaser on their team who’s given a list of who knows how many items they have to go find. The value I provide in that transaction is that your purchaser contacts me and, within one day, has a response for every item they need, sourced from the most efficient location, because I’m partnered with every vendor in the area. Maybe there are one or two I don’t know of. But by and large, whereas you may know 15 people in the market, I know a hundred. The source you find on your own may be 40 miles from your project and have good material. My source is 15 miles from your project and has better material, but doesn’t have a website. They’re not going to sell to you because they don’t know you. It’s a mom and pop shop. They’ve known me for 10 years, and my checks have always been good.
So the service I’m offering is more about how smooth I can make this transaction for my three customers. I have a supplier, but they’re really a customer, right? The better I do for the supplier that produces that aggregate, the more they refer their clients to me, the more they hire my trucks to deliver on their orders, and the more customers I can pick up through that network. The customer side is more self-explanatory. Of course that’s a customer. But our truckers are also our customers, and we’re trying to develop a service that makes sense for them, because their alternative is to just not use us and not pay a commission to work with us.
We’re in a unique position being in the middle, where we’re not actually producing anything other than efficiency. Is it better on average to work with Twisted Nail and not have to worry about where you’re getting the material from? Not have to worry about, “That truck broke down, where am I going to find another one?” We have 400 trucks. We can just pull another one up. Or the
Hunter Kosar (12:52): quarry that produces that very, very specific rock ran out, and I had to go 70 miles to find that rock. Where can I find the next rock? Well, we know, and we know beforehand, because the quarry operates with us. They call us and tell us, “We’re running out of material. You need to find another supplier.” We elevate every touch point in the transaction because of how informative we are and how much our customers and vendors trust us within the transaction. We add a level of transparency that, in our opinion and in many of our customers’ opinion, is worth paying a premium for.
Customers and Suppliers
Gordon Lamphere (13:30): You mentioned customers. Who primarily is your customer for dirt, rocks, and aggregate?
Hunter Kosar (13:36): It would be general contractors and subcontractors on large-scale commercial projects. To give you some examples of projects we’ve done here in Waco: we’ve done the Baylor basketball stadium, multiple hospital demolitions, various highway interchanges, lakes. We’ve sourced aggregates for housing developments, solar farms, wind farms. At least in Texas, on just about any project, you have to export the bad material, which we do, and then import good material. So it could be anything from a single house to a ten-thousand-home subdivision. That customer can contact us and have all of their aggregate needs not only met, but met in a way that exceeds anything an individual supplier could do.
Gordon Lamphere (14:25): And you mentioned some of your sellers. Who are your sellers? I know you mentioned it’s very fractured and it’s a lot of mom and pops. Is that your primary selling demographic?
Hunter Kosar (14:39): I would say our primary selling demographic is anybody who sells rock, dirt, sand, or gravel, or who accepts haul-off. I log anybody who produces rock of any quality, of any kind, in my database, because I don’t know what the next customer’s requirements are going to be. Our vendors can be anybody. It could be your backyard, and you sell topsoil out of it. I’d put you in our database, because I never know if your neighbor two weeks from now is going to need topsoil and you’re the best supplier for it.
Mostly it’s quarries and mines, but we do sometimes have ranchers who will accept haul-off and disposal of rubble and rock. Most of those are industry connections, though. It’s not that the ranch is always accepting it. It turns out that a trucker knows somebody who knows a rancher. So I’d say 98% of what we do happens at a quarry. It just may not be a publicly known quarry. It may be one that only sells to people they know.
And the size varies. There are huge companies too. A lot of the strategy in aggregate supply is that once you get to a certain size, the only way to grow, because a quarry is in the ground and you can’t just pick it up and move it, is to purchase or start a new quarry in your market area. When you’re a Knife River or a Webber or somebody that’s huge, you’re not trying to start from scratch. You’re ready to go right now. So what I see in the market is that mom and pop operators will operate for a handful of years, and if they see some success, they tend to draw interest from the Martin Mariettas of the world, the ready-mix producers and suppliers and asphalt producers. They will purchase that quarry to strengthen their internal vertical supply chain.
Hunter Kosar (16:37): They’re not necessarily purchasing it to get the benefit of selling to the public, though they will. They’re mostly purchasing it to fuel their needs for internal production.
An Industry in Survival Mode
Gordon Lamphere (16:52): Talking about fuel, one of the fuels for your growth has been seeing opportunity, and a lot of that has come from challenges in the industry. Where do you see the challenges right now in the industry that are creating opportunity for new brokers or new businesses coming in?
Hunter Kosar (17:18): Right now, I think we’re not necessarily in a season of opportunity for a new operator. I think the industry is in a bit of survival mode. The operators that have been very efficient, that have saved and haven’t necessarily grown at an exponential rate, are where I think the opportunity is right now, because of how unstable the construction market feels. We’re still in the beginning phases of figuring out what the heck is going on.
I tell our carriers that our operating range in January and February is typically 10%. If we would have run a million, we’re going to run a hundred thousand in those two months. That tends to kick up over the next months, 30, 50, 70, until right about now we should be running wide open. That typically means around 60 to 70 trucks on the road for Twisted Nail delivering to commercial projects.
This year, in the winter part of the year, January through March, we bid so many large projects. We bid more in those three months than we had ever bid in any single year before that. So in the beginning of the year, we felt like this was about to be a really, really busy year. But as the year has progressed, especially surrounding the tariff conversation, things changed. When you’re talking about grabbing local dirt and moving it to a local project, you wouldn’t assume that the larger economy and the tariff conversation would have an impact. But when you pause and think about it, look at the customers building these projects. Let’s use a solar farm as an example. I don’t know the specific numbers, but I know that solar and alternative energy have been hit with a significant tariff burden. If you’re an owner about to put in a thousand-acre solar farm, and it turns out that the inputs you’re going to use have just increased in price 100% in one year, you’re probably going to pause your project.
So our best estimate of what’s happening in the market is that these projects, which are tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, can easily pause for six months and say, let’s just see what’s happening. That typically happens whenever there’s an administration change, regardless of party. In construction in Texas, if there’s an election, things slow down while everybody feels out what’s about to happen and what changes are coming through. This time it
Hunter Kosar (19:45): feels a bit different. We’re very prepared and very lean, so while we’re comfortable, we are seeing the conversations happening in the market, and they’re not comfortable conversations. These truckers are in a situation where we don’t know how long it’s going to last or how bad it could get. But I do know that the market has cooled off significantly.
What we anticipate is that those projects are just going to be kicked into the fall, and then we’re going to have a tremendous balloon at some point. That’s an area where we thrive. If there’s a shortage in the market, we are excellent, because that means there’s so much demand that we can offer the trucks a rate they normally would not get, which means our customers get supply they normally would not have access to. Because if every project for the next six months kicks off in October, there is going to be an extreme shortage of trucks in October. Not only because those projects were delayed, but because in the interim, the market has been bad. Companies that have not operated lean, that have not operated with some fiscal responsibility, are steadily going to go out of business, and that further restricts supply.
So we tend to ride the wave of supply and demand. Right now, there’s not very much demand and a significant amount of supply. In the last two months, I think we’ve had more rain than in any period in the last 10 years, the last time I looked at it, and rain really disrupts what we’re doing. So right now we don’t have an answer. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next three months. We expect things are going to be significantly slower than in previous years, but we’re going to be fine. Then in the fall, or in early 2026, we expect these projects that have been postponed and delayed, especially if there’s a walk-back on tariffs, to start firing right back up. If so, especially with the gap that’s created as a lot of these operators drop off, it’s going to be a very, very busy, and on the general contractor and subcontractor side, a very expensive
Hunter Kosar (22:02): fall to get material imported. And it’s not even just on my side. Take the quarries as an example. Especially as we were going through 2020 and the supply shocks that came with that, everybody realized that the pricing on this material is very elastic. The customers are not price sensitive. If you can take a material you sell for five dollars and sell it for eight dollars, that is a massive change for a quarry, and they did it. Not just one quarry. As a whole, the market was able to raise prices like that, on both the material side and the trucking supply side. So I suspect that if we continue to go through these waves, we’ll continue to see the market test this price elasticity, to see whether it’s a really static industry or whether there’s more wiggle room to go up.
We’ve seen that earlier this year. Toward the end of the year, they announce price rollouts for the beginning of the year, and at the beginning of the year you see them come through. We’ve already started getting notices that say you can expect this to happen again in 2026. I wish I had a clearer answer, but to be honest, the market is in a very murky spot right now, and we’re trying to figure it out ourselves.
Efficiency as the Edge
Gordon Lamphere (23:21): Yeah. For us and our market, office, industrial, and land sales have been markedly slower since Liberation Day. There’s been a real shift in the market, particularly for any parcel larger than probably a million and a half dollars, or any building that’s more than two million dollars. We’ve seen a real curtailing in the market. Some of the small stuff is still happening, but for large projects, it’s been a very similar experience on our end.
When I looked into you and some of your content, I think you give unique insight into the construction industry generally and some of the disconnects that happen. As somebody who deals with a lot of construction and logistics related businesses, I certainly know more than your average Joe, but I’m curious where you see some of the largest challenges and disconnects in the industry going forward, and how that plays out as potential opportunity for businesses that are coming in and maybe disrupting parts of the construction and logistics industry.
Hunter Kosar (24:51): I think it depends on where the market heads. If we continue to stay in a rather uncertain time like we are right now, then the operators that excel, and the opportunities that are going to be there, are for people who push hard on efficiency. These are conversations I’ve had internally with my team. We may be looking at another operator who has three projects going, and we just have one. But their minimum may be to keep ninety trucks on the road, and my minimum may be to keep twenty trucks on the road. That’s because I spent ten years trying to craft the most efficient team I can and to change every process, so one unit of effort for me may be four units of effort for my competition.
In really turbulent times, the operators that put an emphasis on software, fuel efficiency, and route efficiency, and that take every load seriously, will do well. In good times, the mentality tends to be, if I show up at 7:30 and leave at 3:30, I still get five loads instead of six. The people who try to grab that sixth, knowing there may not be a job tomorrow to get five on, are the people who will see success. I think we’ve built a great culture internally around that, of really pushing our processes and having our people challenge the way we do things.
Even this week we’ve been having conversations about how to make our quoting process more efficient so the turnaround time doesn’t eat up our salesperson’s time and they can just get quick driveway quotes out. That seems trivial when you look at our revenue and compare it to a six-hundred-dollar driveway, but it’s attacking the problem, which is inefficiency. In construction particularly, a lot of the industry is just, “I don’t know, I’m just going to do it and hope at the end that I made money.” Even the story I told you at the beginning about my stepfather: he didn’t know the answer. He was just moving forward in good faith. That’s a really dangerous mentality to have in this particular season. So the opportunity, and the thing I’m putting not only my time but my money into, is how I can make this company
Hunter Kosar (27:07): still profitable while being tiny, the smallest company you could imagine, because we have no clue what the work volume is going to be. I’ve never been in an economy where, and not to suggest that one thing or another is going to happen, but say a global war happens. What happens? I’ve never lived through that. I have no concept of how that would shut down the commercial construction market. Do the states pull back their budgets? A lot of our work comes from tech. Would they pause these major contracts? If so, that leads to an influx of supply.
So you don’t know the answer. You don’t know what’s coming around the corner. But the only way I know to prepare for it is to become efficient, to make it so that this whole operation can run on 15 trucks. I used to keep 15 trucks busy just by myself, so surely with a team of six, I can keep 15 busy as well. That’s our goal, and that’s how we’re attacking this uncertainty. We’re trying anything and everything we can to become the most efficient operation we can be. Beyond that, a lot of it’s luck, right? I can’t change the economy. This is the circumstance I’ve been dealt, and I can assemble the best hand with the best people. Sometimes that’s not enough, but I suspect and hope that it is enough in our case. It’s certainly where I see the opportunity, particularly in a market where it doesn’t feel like there’s much opportunity right now.
I have people call in saying they’re about to buy a dump truck. They’re switching from a different category of freight because their instinct says people need dirt all the time. I explain the same thing to them: this is probably not a good time to become a new operator here. If you’re more familiar and you’ve done it before, you understand what to expect, and I can explain to you in terms you’ll understand why this isn’t a good opportunity. But a lot of people are desperate, and a lot of people make desperate decisions.
In this first season, as we’re getting through the first months of difficulty, people will go out and severely underbid a project. We’re not even going to entertain underbidding, because that’s not our brand, our reputation, or what we are in the market. So we have to wait for that project to realize that the person can’t deliver and call us back, and then we can come back in at a normalized rate. A lot of that patience, being in a spot where I can say that
Hunter Kosar (29:28): and be confident that it’s okay for us to have that strategy, is because of our efficiency and how we’ve handled our cash reserves historically. We stay very well financed. We have a good bit of equity in the company. We have a long runway is a good way to say it, so we’re able to ride the dips. We just don’t know if the dip is over in a month, or if we’ll be having this conversation at this same time in 2026.
It’s impossible to predict. The only thing you can do is make yourself as efficient and as valuable to your customer as you can, because they’re trying to do the same thing. They’ll be saying, “I had to convince this owner that it’s a good time to restart this project, and if I’m running up the budget, they’re just going to pause it again.” They have their own concerns, and working with those customers means realizing they’re just communicating to us what the end money is telling them. If we can make the deal work, we do it. If we can’t, then it’s having the patience to know that we’ve worked hard to develop the runway so we can outlast whatever is happening in the broader economy.
Why Bids Go Wrong
Gordon Lamphere (30:39): Why are people making such large mistakes in bidding out contracts, or in the trucking industry’s bidding process in general?
Hunter Kosar (30:49): I think it’s a combination of things. I’m going to speak only to the trucking side, because it’s the side I’m more familiar with, but I’m sure it’s the same with most general and subcontractors. You have some operators that operate in good faith. We did this today. We told somebody we’re not a good match for their contract. Even though we would love to be a part of that contract, it’s better to be a faithful operator and say we’re not a great match. But there are many people who, like we’ve alluded to, need to eat tomorrow and don’t have a contract. So the only thing they’re going to do is get the contract, and they don’t consider the consequences that may fall out if they can’t get it done, because the consequences of tomorrow are much steeper to them.
In my experience, as these operators get their backs against the wall and need to maintain what they’ve been doing, say last year they earned a million, they have to earn at least a million this year or they’re a failure. With that type of mentality, they’re going to bid whatever it takes to land the contract and deal with the consequences later. We’ve been around long enough to know that the customer is not going to call you back. You’ve failed them in a way that means when they call me back, they’re going to get a price that’s more expensive than if they had just gone with me to begin with, because now I’m scrambling. I’ve already assigned those trucks somewhere else, and there’s less available to them in the market than if the general contractor had just chosen a reputable operator to begin with.
For the general contractors and subcontractors, it’s always the “you get what you pay for” argument. If you hire the very cheapest bid, you’re going to get, on average, the very cheapest result, and that’s not always what’s best for your project. We have a lot of projects where they’ll take the cheapest bid, and they need to import a thousand tons a day, which is a modest project for us but maybe a huge project for a competitor. Then that competitor falls short. They fell short because they assumed the trucks would take $900 a day to deliver the material, and they assumed wrong, because the trucks just won’t go. Now, there are cases where the trucks will go because they’re equally desperate. I’ve not been one of those operators, so I’m not sure how the end game plays out for them.
Hunter Kosar (33:08): They may be able to survive through it, but their reputation, particularly with the premium GCs and subs who would use somebody like me, is totally eviscerated. There’s no shot. They’re blacklisted just for missing one delivery on one contract. So I think a lot of the missteps come from people assuming the consequences of a week from now are going to be significantly less than the consequences of tomorrow.
But it’s very short-sighted, and it’s short-sighted because they had a short-sighted operating philosophy. If they’d had a long-view operating philosophy, they would have saved, kept their capital, and prepared for this moment. But they didn’t. They grew rapidly or they added equipment. And I’ve done that. When I first started, I grew way too fast, ran out of money, had to pull from credit cards, was desperate, and took any rate. But I did it one time, I learned, and I haven’t done it since.
It’s really difficult to put blame on an operator and say they just don’t know, or they’re not smart enough, or they’re not good enough at their job. They could be all of those things and still get desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. If you could say I was salty, which I wouldn’t classify myself as, I’m salty about the people who are clearly bidding something that’s never going to work. If they had just not bid, I probably would have gotten the contract, or somebody offering a similar service would have, and things would have gone a lot smoother.
As these individual operators get more desperate, they say, “I can do a thousand tons with just my one truck,” and they don’t realize the customer needs it in two days. They just see a thousand tons and think, I can do that, no problem. They submit the bid, and the customer selects it because it’s a good bid. There are no middleman fees, or they’re offering the material at cost instead of charging a premium. Then they don’t realize they have to finance that material for free for 60 days or however long. If that customer buys a hundred thousand dollars of material, you’re on hold for that until they pay you. So I think it’s a lack of experience, maybe, but also, in an economy like the one we’re in, it’s not a situation where everything’s critical and alarms are going off, but the warning signs are certainly there that things are not smooth for everybody in this market.
Hunter Kosar (35:30): You just get people who have to do something. Those wheels have to turn. That’s what I tell the trucks when I’m recruiting them: “Hey, I understand that your wheels have to turn. I’m not going to tell you that your truck can only run for me. You need to be hustling up your own work. I want to be one of your customers. I don’t want to be your only customer.” Because if I’m your only customer, no matter what I do, you’re going to be mad at me, because you’re not getting the money you think you’re worth or the amount of work you think your truck deserves. And operators whose bank is calling, who have to pay their truck note, are going to accept whatever somebody will pay them, because zero is not an option for them. Operators like me, whose equipment is paid off, could just ride it out.
What the Public Gets Wrong About Truckers
Gordon Lamphere (36:17): What do you think, in general, the public gets most wrong about the trucking industry?
Hunter Kosar (36:29): This isn’t necessarily related to aggregate sales, but before being in the trucking industry, I felt like trucks and semis were unsafe. I tried to stay away from them on the roads and highways. I wouldn’t want to drive next to them. After being in the trucking industry, I’ve seen that a lot of these drivers have a million, two million miles of accident-free driving. They may be the best drivers on the road. They may be the most aware people. That’s not always the case, but I think the public at large villainizes truck drivers. You can see it partly in litigation. I know there are instances where litigation is required, but I think we can all appreciate how aggressively the trucking industry is pursued if there’s an accident, and how all-encompassing those lawsuits can be.
I think that extends beyond the courtroom. An example I give is that when I had trucks, we would haul rock, and we’d get complaints all the time from the public about the trucks being slow or being in the way or whatever the case may be. Likewise, local law enforcement would get those complaints. There were times when an officer would sit outside my gate, and if a truck left that gate, they would pull it over and issue it a citation. We’re doing our very best. We’re operating above board. We’ve been audited, and we do well in our audits. We’re a good operator in the industry, and we were still being run out by the people of our community, just for contributing to building their homes and the stores they go to.
I think there’s just such a villain aspect to trucking, and to contractors as well. I understand truckers are difficult. I have a career because truckers are difficult. That’s my whole job. But they’re good people, they work hard, and they want what’s best for them. They’re not greedy people. They’re not trying to run your job off. They just want to get paid what’s fair to them. And you can see the fear people have of this large machine traveling down the highway in every interaction they have with the
Hunter Kosar (38:50): public. It’s not obvious. It’s not like they’re shaking when they’re next to a truck. But it’s the way they treat that trucker, as if he or she is not just as much a part of this community, as if their home is not three miles down the road. As if that truck didn’t deliver the load that’s under the sidewalk where they’re waving their fists at it.
I would hope that the public knew a trucker, and knew that, hey, my Uncle Tom’s a trucker and he’s a normal guy, because a lot of them are. A lot of them are rough people too, I understand that. But that’s all of society. You could go to any industry, and there are rough actors and good actors and everyone in between. By default, I think people tend to assume that if you’re a trucker, you must be part of the problem. In my experience, they’re very much part of the solution. They’re entrepreneurs.
How many people go into business by themselves simply by buying a truck and a trailer? For fifty grand, you can be your own boss. That’s tremendous. That’s a huge leap of faith for a blue-collar family to come together and say, “You’re going to quit your job and buy this truck.” When a trucker does that, it’s a very positive, hopeful thing. They want to contribute to their community in a positive way. Then they get the truck, and they realize the customers treat them poorly, the people on the roads treat them poorly, and the people who hire them treat them poorly. They’re treated badly all the time, and then we wonder why they come across as gruff. They come across as gruff because they catch nothing but heat, from law enforcement to regular citizens. Every step of the way, it feels like the system is out to put them out of business.
So that’s what I think the public gets most wrong. These are your neighbors, and they took a risk to buy a truck to help their community, to be a working part of it, to be home with their kids earlier. All of that gets missed because they’re in this big hunk of metal traveling down the highway, and someone’s friend of a friend was in an accident once, so every truck must be bad.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere (41:04): We’re traveling to the end of the podcast, and one of the ways we like to wrap it up is with our Final Four. That’s four quick questions that give us a little more insight into the industry and a little more insight into you. The first question I always like to ask is: what do you think is going to change the most about logistics and trucking over the next ten years?
Hunter Kosar (41:32): Ten years is a long window. A lot can happen in ten years. I’m excited about the potential of self-driving vehicles. I think right now there are trucks hauling from Dallas to Houston with a driver in the passenger seat and the truck driving itself. But I don’t think that’s going to take over in the next 10 years. I think the driver aspect is really critical.
For me, what you’re going to see in the next 10 years is a lot of those mom and pops I was just talking about disappear, because my industry, I feel, is lagging behind the efficiency standards of other industries. When you look at tech, banking, or restaurants, the focus is: we have a working model, how can we make it as efficient as possible and then copy and paste it? In trucking, the industry is just now starting to catch on to that. Van freight and flatbed freight are totally different. They’ve been in technology for a long time. But in aggregate hauling and quarry production specifically, for whatever reason, they haven’t modernized. They don’t even have websites. They’re not online. They’re not aggregated that way.
So I think in the next 10 years you’re going to see a rise in operators like me who insist that happens. You can keep doing whatever you’re going to do, but I’m going to do it for you, and you won’t even know it’s happening. And you’re going to see less opportunity for the mom and pop to just buy a truck and get into trucking than in the ten years prior. I think that’s going to slowly fade away, and it’s going to be more and more large operators, even in regional markets.
Gordon Lamphere (43:18): We’ve taken a step forward to the future. Now let’s take a step back. One of the things I always find fascinating about bringing interesting, successful people on is that they have unique insight into how to start your career. We have a lot of younger people who listen to this podcast, and I’d put anyone under thirty in that picture. If you could give yourself some advice when you were twenty-two, what would it be?
Hunter Kosar (43:58): It’s a good time to ask. I started the business around twenty-one or twenty-two. I’d give myself a lot of advice, to be honest. I would give myself so much advice. And in a way, I’m glad I can’t, because if I could give myself advice, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have come up with a million reasons why I didn’t want to be under a truck, sleeping twelve hours in five days just to keep these trucks running while keeping my full-time job and just busting it. But it was worth it. It’s so much effort and it’s so hard, but now, the job I have isn’t easy, but it’s the job I wanted. I wanted to be at the top end of these negotiations. I knew that as an individual, I didn’t have the negotiating power. I wasn’t in a place where I could leverage my skill set.
So it’s kind of a Catch-22. If I could give myself advice at 22, I think I would have ended up convincing myself not to do it. In that ignorance I had, I thought anything was possible. I can do this. Everybody who tells me I can’t is wrong. They don’t know me. I’m going to do it. That mentality is me to a fault, and because of it, I found success. Because I was more stubborn than a very, very stubborn industry, I was able to eke out a little bit of success over the last 10 years and find my foothold here.
So I don’t know that I’d offer myself advice so much as encouragement. I would say, if you keep going, if you keep working like this, you’re going to make it. You don’t know yet if it’ll be your lifelong career, right? But what you’ve envisioned, what you’ve created and put in this pitch deck to put in front of your first investor, is a possibility. It can be a reality if you keep it up. Just know that every step in between is going to be miserable, but when you get there, you’re going to look back and say it was worth it. That would be the advice I’d give.
Gordon Lamphere (45:58): Yeah, there’s tremendous power in ignorant faith, faith that something’s going to go right. I know for me, there are a lot of projects I would never have started if I’d known how much work they were, but looking back now, they’re deeply meaningful. One of the things we like to find meaning in is books. I’m curious if you have a book you would recommend to anybody listening.
Hunter Kosar (46:29): I am so bad at titles and names. I can hardly even name songs. But these days I tend to focus my reading on anything that addresses the problem I’m currently facing. The E-Myth is the last book I read. Its core concept is: you have an idea, and you’re working in your business as the cashier or the manager, but how do you get to that next level? What do people do to remove themselves from the business, so they’re working on the business, on its processes? How can you make this an easily replicable business so you can do the next thing, and the next thing?
It’s something I’ve always preached internally, but I hadn’t necessarily seen it in text, so well thought out. If there’s a problem, you either need a person or a process to fix that problem. This book focuses heavily on the process. It says that if you have the process, the person is relatively easy to plug into it. That’s the whole point: come up with a process so that if that person leaves or can’t do the job anymore, you can just plug another person in. That’s been very helpful, and I would recommend that book. I do think it was a little long-winded in getting to the point, but its point is very good.
Gordon Lamphere (47:52): I’ve heard the same thing about The E-Myth. Some people joke that it’s a very long-winded way to say “implement more process.”
Hunter Kosar (48:05): Yeah.
Gordon Lamphere: In terms of implementing a process, this podcast has been a process to gather great voices, and we find that one of the best ways to gather a great voice for the podcast is to reach out to other voices in the industry and ask, “Who the heck should we have on?” So I’m curious, who’s the next person who should hop on the podcast?
Hunter Kosar (48:29): If I’m being hopeful for you, I think he’d be such an interesting guest. He’s very involved in the Waco community and in the nonprofit scene, and he wants to see young entrepreneurs succeed. His name is Weldon Ratliff. Unfortunately, I can’t help you get in touch with him. He’s a very private person, but he’s a very honest and helpful person. I’ve called Weldon multiple times in my career, but twice I really needed to, and both times he was the sole reason I got out of a jam that would have cost me significantly. He’s so knowledgeable. Honestly, if I could be hopeful, he’s somebody who might look upon me in future years and let me learn from him in some ways. He’s big into real estate development. He has a huge project here in Waco, on the riverfront, where he’s working with investment groups, the City of Waco, and private advisory councils to develop a 521-acre mixed-use development. It has a marina, shops, houses. It’s a huge, huge development for the city. If I could shoot for the moon, that’s who I would advise you to get.
If I could shoot for somebody more realistic, one of my favorite people in Waco is Thomas Arnold. Thomas is everything I just said about Weldon, but he’s very approachable. He’s somebody you can find very easily, and he’s open to talking to you. He owns a crushed concrete production business. You’ve talked to the supply side, right? You’d be talking to one of my vendors. Thomas is such a deep well of knowledge about construction markets, how those markets are moving, and how people feel in this market. If I’m ever frazzled and don’t know what’s going on, Thomas is my first call. In fact, Thomas is such a first call that he’s the one who connects me to Weldon and people who have elevated experience in my industry. So Thomas Arnold is somebody I could easily connect you with, and Thomas would be better suited to connect you with my home run suggestion, which would be Weldon. I think both of those would be great content for your listeners.
Gordon Lamphere (50:50): We’ll try to reach out to both. But if somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Hunter Kosar (50:56): LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn as Hunter Kosar, K-O-S-A-R. Twisted Nail is a brand that’s somewhat easy to find online, and you can reach out through the website as well. Feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn. I check it, though we all get a lot of spam on LinkedIn, so I may be slow on it. But it’s useful. With many of my customers, my first contact came from reaching out on LinkedIn to somebody employed there, who gave me the contact I needed to get in at that customer. So I would say LinkedIn is a great way to do it, and if we get a conversation going, I have no problem sending my contact information and talking to people.
Gordon Lamphere (51:37): Thank you so very much, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Hunter Kosar (51:39): Yeah, it’s been fun. I really appreciate you having me.
Gordon Lamphere (51:42): Thanks again to Hunter. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.