USA Truck, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the USA Truck Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press one. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Stevens, Senior Vice President, Finance, Strategy, and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Taryn. Good morning and welcome to USAT Capacity Solutions' third quarter earnings conference call. Joining us this morning from the company are James Reed, President and CEO, and Zach King, Senior Vice President and CFO. Thank you for joining us today. In order to help you better understand USAT Capacity Solutions and its results, some forward-looking statements could be made during the call. As we all know, forward-looking statements by their very nature are subject to uncertainties and risks. For more complete discussion of factors that could affect the company's future results, please refer to the forward-looking statement section of the company's earnings press release and the company's most recent SEC public filings. In order to provide you more meaningful comparisons, certain information discussed on the conference call could include non-GAAP financial measures as outlined and described in the tables in our earnings press release. I'll now turn the time over to James.

Great. Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. The third quarter performance at USA Truck represents the fifth consecutive quarter record-setting results, and our team delivered the best Q3 adjusted operating income and adjusted earnings per share in our company's history and the highest revenue quarter in the history of USA Truck. The third quarter was our second consecutive record-setting revenue quarter. Our self-help story hasn't changed since we first rolled it out just over four years ago. We are still focused on and improving our asset business, continued success in our logistics segment, and we're now cementing our culture that is focused on delivering value to shareholders. The ingredients remain unchanged. We have refined our network, we have worked tirelessly to keep trucks seated, and have been relentless about growing revenue per tractor. On the logistics side, we committed early on to creating a market-leading volume engine that can thrive in up and down markets alike. And now that we have cracked that code, we're now growing the team. And if the company observer looks back over that time horizon, they would see that this team does exactly what we said we would do. Years ago, I said on an earnings call that the culture and the people at USA Truck had learned to lose. The challenge, of course, in that mindset is that people only see roadblocks and challenges to their aspirations. Fast forward to today, and despite all the progress and all the records, we don't simply relish in winning. We long for even more progress, and we believe that there is still great margin for growth. You see, there's something funny about winners. They're never satisfied. Even though we are in a period of the highest revenues and earnings in the company's history, the tone of our internal reviews is more hungry, more opportunistic, and more frustrated with the missed opportunities than we are relishing in results. Winners hate missing opportunities and losing more than they like winning. We expect to see upside from where we are exiting Q3. We can say that because we still see a number of opportunities that went unrecognized in the quarter, specific areas of profit enhancement, and even more opportunities to stabilize our decision processes and execution through all phases of the cycle. USA Truck has outperformed most of our public peers in terms of price performance. We've continued to improve profit margins each quarter and now have $2.19 in trailing 12-month adjusted earnings per share. We remain dissatisfied with the public market's pace in recognizing our consistent performance over the last four years, with multiples that reflect the new and improved version of USA Truck. But we believe in the market's overall long-term performance. that the market overall is the long-term arbiter of value, and we intend to just keep improving earnings and controlling what we can. Our balance sheet is strong and improving, and our liquidity and leverage metrics position us well for future growth. Today we will offer updates on the market dynamics, segment performance in the quarter, and our progress in our self-help transformational initiatives, and finally on the outlook. So I'll now turn it over to Zach to discuss the financial results.