Reprice at renewal
When it may fit: The customer is fairly profitable but under-priced.
Evidence needed: Cost to serve and market rates.
Trade-off: May lose the customer.
Fleet Intelligence Brief
How to Investigate Unprofitable Customer or Lane Relationships
Some freight keeps the trucks moving and costs more than it earns. The work is finding it, understanding why, and deciding whether to fix it, reprice it or let it go.
1. The business problem
Which customers or lanes are costing us money, and what should we do about them?
In many fleets a minority of customers and lanes produce the profit and a minority consume it. The weak ones persist because revenue looks fine, because they keep trucks busy, or because no one has measured them fully.
Judging a relationship fairly means including every cost it causes: miles, empty return, waiting time, special handling and payment delays.
2. What the evidence can reveal
A relationship review examines the full cost to serve:
- Calculated Revenue and direct cost for each customer or lane.
- Calculated Contribution margin and its trend.
- Calculated The costs that do not appear on the load: deadhead, detention, accessorial work, late payment.
- Information gap Strategic value: whether the customer opens doors elsewhere, brings backhaul freight or anchors a lane.
Unprofitable does not always mean drop. It can mean reprice, restructure or accept deliberately.
3. Investigate the problem
In the synthetic carrier, Calculated three of six lanes saw contribution fall while revenue grew. Midwest regional revenue grew 6.9% but direct costs grew 13.6%, so contribution fell 14.3% to $600K. Northeast corridor contribution fell 10.0%.
Calculated The weakest lane is cross-country spot, with a contribution margin of 14.8% and a 6.0 pts drop. In contrast, Southeast dedicated, Port drayage and Regional LTL held or improved their contribution. The pattern separates lanes whose costs are growing out of line from lanes that are not.
Hypothesis A lane with falling margin may need a rate increase, a cost fix or a different customer mix. Information gap The demo cannot go below the lane to the customer level, which is where most of these decisions are made. Before dropping a relationship, check whether it brings freight in the return direction or underpins a lane that would otherwise be empty.
4. Explore the interactive experience
Investigate it yourself.
Fleet Economics Dashboard: a lane-level dashboard with empty-mile share, a scenario simulator for rate, fuel, miles and empty miles, evidence-linked answers from APIS, and a sample brief, all on synthetic data.
The experience below is built on a synthetic carrier, “Demo Freight Co.,” analyzed by lane. It has no customer-level, vehicle-level or delivery-level records, so lanes are used to show the method. Nothing in it is real.
- In the lane table, read the Contribution Δ column. Which lanes are losing contribution?
- Select Midwest regional and compare revenue growth with direct-cost growth.
- Ask APIS why a lane can grow and lose money.
5. Evaluate possible solutions
There are four common responses, and the right one depends on what the analysis shows.
6. What leadership should do next
Questions to answer
- Which customers or lanes lose money after all costs?
- Are the losses growing?
- What is the cause?
- What strategic value does it have?
Data to gather
- Customer-level revenue and cost
- Detention and accessorial records
- Payment history
- Lane and backhaul data
Steps to take
- Rank by full contribution.
- Investigate the bottom five.
- Decide reprice, restructure or exit.
- Track results.
7. Engage Two Pillars
Understand the Economics of Your Fleet
Two Pillars can help carriers, fleet operators, brokers and logistics businesses investigate lane, vehicle, customer, cost and expansion economics using your own data. A good first step is a customer and lane profitability review that counts the full cost to serve.
Sources and data notes
- The organization, its figures, and every number in this article and its interactive experience are synthetic and illustrative. They are not real data, a benchmark, or a forecast.
- Reviewed October 2026. This article describes an approach to investigation. It does not replace review by qualified professionals.