A Truckers' Life - Working Man in the Transportation Industry

I know a lot of working men, heck, I'm a working man myself.  I just recently posted about my tree removal companies' new website, which sort of plays a role into this weeks post.  I took my company, which has been around for 10+ years, and started to modernize it by getting it only.  I want to tell the story of a similar situation, where a regular working guy started his own company and had to work hard to build it up, including mordernizing and scaling up, hiring employees, getting loans, all that sort of stuff. What I did wasn't nearly as complex, but it still shares some similarities.  It's still an old fashioned business working to make themselves modern and relevant in a changing economy.

The Story - It Started With a Truck

So my friend Kevin was working for at least 5 years, saving all his pennies, and he was finally able to buy his own Semi-Truck.  A big expense that put him in the hole for a pretty large sum, be he was happy about it.  He could now do his own work and make his own deliveries, keeping a bigger share of the profit.  Until then he had been working for various transportation companies and they would pay him a wage, but he was close enough to the action to know that the real money was being kept for the big-wigs in the corporate offices.

He didn't want to stay an underling forever, so he figured the first step would be to get himself his own wheels.  He could make deliveries, shipments and keep all the money for himself.  He thought it was a rather simple plan, but sadly it wasn't so simple.

After all the expenses, and taxes, and man-hours, and gas, Kevin was only bringing in a little bit more than he was making as a wage worker.  Plus he had all the extra headaches of handling with bureaucracies and payment processing, it was kind of a mess.  He started realizing that this thing would only work if he wasn't the one to do both the management and the manual labor, he needed workers of his own. 

And Then Came More Trucks...

So he was wondering what to do, because he only had the one truck but needed to quickly scale up.  He didn't want to wait around for his pennies to pile up again.  He tells me that if he would have waited, he'd still be working that one truck (this was 10 years ago)... So he asks around about companies that help to build corporate credit of a transportation company, and is eventually able to land a large loan that helps finance 3 more trucks.  He now has a fleet! 

Being in the transportation industry for the last several years he has plenty of contacts so he's able to get workers without a problem.  He also knows which ones are the slackers and which ones of the good workers, so he's able get a solid work force going.

And The Rest Is History...

Kevin still operates his trucking company and it has yet to reach global and worldwide renown,  but he is still a success story of a working man.  Hopefully I can be one just like it, take an old trade and moving it into the new age with a little bit of innovation and a whole lot of will power.  Cheers to Kevin!