About · Why Now

The trucking industry is at an inflection point.

Driver supply is structurally constrained. Regulatory enforcement is tightening every quarter. Equipment markets are in motion. And most of the shops carriers rely on were built for a market that doesn't exist anymore.

// The Inflection Point

Where trucking is right now, and why right now matters.

01 // Driver supply has structurally broken.

Clearinghouse prohibited-status counts climb every quarter. CDL training pathways have narrowed. The drivers carriers can hire are not being replaced at parity, and the structural drivers all point the same direction. This is not a cyclical shortage. It is a structural one. Most carriers are still planning around the old assumption that supply will normalize. It won't.

02 // Regulatory enforcement is the bigger story than regulation.

The FMCSA Restoring Integrity to the Issuance of Non-Domiciled CDLs final rule. Dalilah's Law, with the Connor's Law amendment expanding 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2) English language proficiency enforcement. State-level CDL audits. Non-domiciled CDL revocations. Foreign dispatch arrangements under scrutiny.

The rules themselves are not the change. The enforcement is. Carrier liability is expanding from "knowingly" to "affirmative duty to verify." Driver qualification files are getting audited at rates that didn't exist three years ago. If your hiring process was built on the assumption that compliance would handle itself, your hiring process is now a liability vector.

03 // Recruiting economics have inverted.

Cost per seated driver has roughly doubled in five years. Job boards charge per application; carriers pay more every year for worse quality. Activity-based pricing is now misaligned with the actual problem. The problem is not application volume. It is qualified-driver retention. Most recruiting vendors are still selling the old model into a market that needs the new one.

04 // Equipment is the #1 most-cited reason drivers leave.

Industry retention exit data ranks equipment as the largest single category of driver feedback, ahead of compensation and ahead of operations. Aging iron. Recurring shop time. Equipment assignment friction. Newer trucks across the fence. A recruiter can talk about pay, lanes, and home time. Equipment decisions get made above the recruiter's pay grade. Carriers solving the recruiting problem without solving the equipment problem are solving the wrong half of the equation.

05 // Carrier consolidation is accelerating.

Yellow. Convoy. U.S. Xpress. Dozens of mid-size carriers absorbed or shut down every quarter. Each consolidation creates two waves: displaced drivers and surplus equipment. Both flow through lanes the market doesn't index. The shops watching for those waves get the drivers first and the equipment second. The shops not watching get neither.

06 // The equipment market is in transition.

Coming out of an overbuilt 2022–2023, used pricing has moved on different timelines per equipment class, lease returns are working through the system, EPA emissions rules are forcing turnover, and OEMs are aggressive on new builds. The downstream secondary market is bigger and more active than it has been in years. The fleets that win this cycle will be the ones with the best intelligence on where iron is moving, not the ones with the deepest balance sheet.

"The shops built for the old market are not built for this one."

07 // AI is splitting the recruiting market.

Some shops are replacing recruiters with chatbots. Drivers complete more applications and stay seated for fewer days. Others are pretending AI doesn't exist. Their cost-per-hire keeps climbing while their conversion rates fall. Neither extreme is the answer.

Data and chatbots get the application completed. Data and human callers get the right driver seated for the long term. Two tool sets, same data layer running underneath both. That is the model that works in this market.

08 // Technology has hit a tipping point.

Five years ago, a small team could not realistically build a multi-source intelligence stack on a small-team budget. The tools were enterprise-grade or they did not exist. Now they are accessible. FMCSA public data. Federal Register APIs. Sentiment scraping. SEC filings. Apollo. Tenstreet. The cost-to-build curve flipped. A disciplined small team can now build moats that did not exist when the incumbent shops were founded.

// The result.

A small team with the right data layer, the right operational discipline, and the right humans on the phone can punch above its weight class in a way that was structurally impossible five years ago. The incumbents are not built for this. Most of them know it. None of them can rebuild fast enough to catch up.

That is the inflection point. That is why right now matters. That is why Old Drum exists.

// A Note From The Founder

Why Old Drum exists.

Most carriers we talk to are fighting the same fight on three fronts at once. A constant churn of drivers in and out of seats, never enough staying long enough to call it retention. Iron that's aging out faster than the cycle can keep up with. Capital that won't move when the deal needs it to. The recruiter, the shop, and the lender all live in different buildings, and the carrier is the one paying for the gaps between them.

A recruiter can talk about pay, lanes, and home time, but equipment decisions get made above the recruiter's pay grade. A truck shop can keep iron running, but it can't talk a driver into staying. A lender can fund the deal, but tracking driver supply isn't part of their job. Three problems, three vendors, three invoices. One outcome: the driver doesn't stay.

That's why we built Old Drum across all three. Recruiting, equipment, and financing under one operator, tied together by the same data layer. Driver retention is the actual problem. Recruiting, equipment, and capital are the three things that drive it. We work on all three.

Data is the spine. The same intelligence that tells us which states are tightening on CDLs also tells us which fleets are about to surplus equipment, which lenders are getting picky, which carriers are losing drivers before they know it themselves. FMCSA Clearinghouse shifts. Regulatory enforcement. Driver sentiment on the forums where drivers actually talk. Class 8 orders. SEC filings. Auction calendars. Without the data, three services are three businesses. With it, they're one operator addressing one problem from three angles.

On recruiting: data and chatbots get the application completed. Data and human callers get the right driver seated for the long term. Two tool sets, used in the right place. Recruiters based in middle and rural America, equipped with intel most recruiters don't know exists. We adapt to your hiring strategy, not the other way around. And we reactivate the leads already sitting dead in your CRM before we touch a new dollar of spend.

On equipment: the same intel layer that reads the driver supply side reads where iron is moving. We source equipment for fleets ready to grow and connect carriers to partner dealers when it's time to refresh. We watch the market before the listings hit, so when you need a truck or need to move iron, we already know where it's going.

On financing: one balance sheet has one risk appetite. A direct lender has to make every deal fit their box. We don't lend. We bring the right partner from our network, sharpened by the same market intelligence that runs the rest of the shop. The pricing is sharper because partners know they're competing inside the network. The math works better for the borrower. And the same data layer helps carriers make better decisions on when to refresh, when to restructure, when to grow — better outcomes for everyone in the deal.

We shoot it straight with drivers. Truckers are professionals and they want to be treated like it. They want predictability. If the job's unpredictable, they want to know that too, in advance, so at least they can predict the unpredictability. The recruiters who close are the ones who tell the truth.

We're in small-town middle America. We eat lunch with the grease monkeys at the diesel shop next door, work a mile from a major truck stop, and run our office across the road from an OTR carrier and a regional distribution center. Our team lives here. They get it because they're surrounded by it.

When a driver climbs in your truck, our work isn't done. We ride along. If they stay, we get paid. If they leave, we have skin in the same problem you do. That's the deal. Effort isn't billable. Outcomes are. One operator, three lanes, data running underneath all of it.

David BurfordFounder & President
// The Team

Three operators. One playbook.

One founder. Two directors. Three distinct backgrounds. Each one built for this work by a different path.

David Burford
Founder & President

David's high school job was at a trucking company. He came back to the industry the long way: undergrad at the University of Missouri, two master's degrees at Indiana University, then the Marine Corps, then a career on Wall Street, then founding Fireclay Partners, a Kansas City investment bank. He started Old Drum to apply the analytical rigor of those worlds to a recruiting market still running on activity-based pricing.

James Burford
Director Of Driver Engagement

James is a Renaissance man. He worked in the ER. He holds two undergraduate degrees and a master's. His alter ego is a college professor who excites young minds to think. All of that is to say he reads people fast and chooses his words on purpose. Truckers don't want to be sold to. They want to be heard, read accurately, and told the truth. James has spent his career doing exactly that, just from different chairs.

Trenton Gregg
Director Of Recruiting

As a young man Trenton became a classically trained horologist. (A horologist is a watchmaker. He went to watchmaking school. We had to look it up too.) Then he turned that same attention to systems thinking, with grit. Precise systems with a lot of moving parts that have to work together or nothing works at all. Cars, code, recruiting funnels, anything with moving parts. He runs our intel stack and the systems behind every operator on the floor. He'll outwork the room.

Let's Talk

Book a 30-min call. We start with your numbers.

Tell us what you're trying to seat. Tell us what you're trying to move. We listen first, look at your numbers against the market data on your lanes, and tell you what we see. If it's a fit, we keep talking.

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