USA Truck, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the USA Truck fourth 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 star two. 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, Holly. Good morning, and welcome to USAT Capacity Solutions' fourth 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. We 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 a more complete discussion of factors that could affect the company's future results, please refer to the forward-looking statements 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. As of next month, USA Truck will have gone public 30 years ago. We want to properly frame the magnitude of our fourth quarter 2021 result in the history of this company in the context of that tenure. The fourth quarter results represent the best adjusted quarterly operating income and adjusted earnings per share in company history, the highest revenue quarter in the history of USA Truck, our third consecutive record-setting quarterly revenue, and the sixth consecutive quarter of record-setting profitability. Our results represent an important milestone in the maturation of the company. There are still many elements of our self-help story in motion. We continue to refine our network. We are realizing the early benefits of regionalization and We continue to improve our revenue per asset utilization. Driver retention has become a sustained area of strength and differentiation. And our logistics business has become a competitive advantage as we have added expertise and scale to this high-priority operation for the company. But an inflection point in our business cadence and business approach has occurred. A key message we hope the listener hears today is that this success is by design, has been in motion for several years, and that we expect this to be sustainable and predictable for years to come. During our 2019 Investor Day held in New York, we laid out a long-term plan that included an introduction of our new brand. While the company is still USA Truck, our go-to-market name was modified to USAT Capacity Solutions. That subtle adjustment signaled a big change in how we approached our customers, our jobs, the market, and our company. The shift to Capacity Solutions represents a move to being more solutions-oriented and which in turn facilitates a service discussion and resultantly mode agnostic approach to solving customers freight challenges. That change alone created a shift internally as well to develop modal alternatives that do not rely entirely on asset availability, capital investment or rigid historical constructs. The results have been fantastic. As we applied this creativity and problem solving, we deployed our USAT Connect technology in innovative ways and created our acclaimed driver load board which won us the CCJ Innovator of the Year award. We deployed API pricing tools whereby nearly 21% of our freight is now booked automatically. And we partnered with technology startups to custom engineer AI-enabled optimized freight booking, selection, and scheduling. This same flexibility of thought freed our mindset to find ways to grow capacity even in the toughest of markets. We refined and expanded our power-only offering that we call PlusP. We actually grew our owner-operator fleet in 2021 9% year-over-year, and our logistics business continued its upward trajectory in growing load counts and profits. As a result of the foregoing, roughly 64% of our company's revenues are now derived from non-asset or asset-light businesses, where someone else provides the tractor and capital. That's an important statistic that notably improves our financial and operational metrics. Our company now looks much differently than it once did, We are a solutions provider, or said differently, a logistics provider that also has an available fleet of approximately 1,900 trucks. The benefits of becoming more asset-light are many. Capital efficiency has improved. Our trailing 12-month ROIC is 11.3%, which is meaningfully higher than our cost of capital. Cash generation. This focus translates to healthy cash generation to support the ongoing growth of the business. A proxy for that is is our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA of approximately $75 million. Flexibility, our ability to pivot and respond to market dynamics is improved with this model. And margin sustainability provides guardrails against inevitable market cycles. These businesses run on percentage-based purchase transportation constructs that provides even greater margin predictability as the cycles change. This gives us a steady base to rely on in expanding the business while protecting profits in all different cycles. The bottom line for us is that USA Truck is a totally different company than it was five years ago, and we have effected that transition through thoughtful strategic planning with management and the board, a new brand that signaled a new approach in our go-to-market strategy, consistent execution on our self-help initiatives, and an overhauled culture led by our amazing people. I cannot say enough about this final point. People have made all the difference to our trajectory and success, and it is they who have created these outstanding results. We expect to see upside in 2022 versus 2021, and believe so because we still see a number of opportunities that went unrecognized in the year, specific areas of profit enhancement, and even more opportunities to improve our decision processes and execution through all phases of the cycle. We expect that 2022 earnings will keep us ahead of schedule with respect to our 2024 strategic goals of 425 to 450 of earnings per share that we outlined in the second quarter last year. Our playbook was largely influenced by the experiences of past turns in the cycle. And so we have diversified our business to have more sustained and predictable margins through our logistics, dedicated, and asset light businesses, while continuing to improve and shore up the asset business. Our network and pricing relies on high volume and the refinement of profitability, architected lanes that we expect will endure the test of time. We have used the robust environment to create a network that we think will be enduring. We also made big strides in ESG and technology as we released our first ES&G report in the quarter, announced a partnership with Nikola, and a technology partnership and business relationship with Convoy. We are moving ahead with a future in mind, informed by the lessons of the past, and so we see a bright future even beyond 2022. We believe the result this quarter and in 2021 overall is the direct outcome of these efforts that has a bit of inevitability to it. We laid out the playbook, stuck to our plan, and now are performing as we had expected and as we had communicated to the street, to the industry, and most importantly, to our customers. We think this performance warrants a more objective review of USA Truck by all market observers. This is a diversified transportation company with the majority of its revenues and a large percentage of its profits derived from asset light and non-asset avenues that execute consistently and profitably. That is who we are, and we hope to garner support for being viewed as such by these and future results. Today, we will offer updates on the market dynamics and segment performance in the quarter and also the outlook. I'll now turn the time over to Zach to discuss the financial results.