Once a Trucker

In 2018 I walked away from engineering school with half a degree and a feeling I couldn't explain. My family thought I was making a mistake. Maybe I was. I wanted to know if the road would take me.

On my first day of training, my mentor looked over from the passenger seat and said,

"Once you're a trucker, you're a trucker."

I didn't understand him then. I do now.

I drove. Then I leased my own truck onto someone else's authority. In 2020 I put my own name on the door and started my company. The world shut down that same year. When it opened again, diesel went through the roof. Carriers bigger than mine closed their doors. I didn't. I slowed down, stayed small, and refused to borrow money I couldn't pay back. Some months, surviving was the whole plan.

The company grew to fifteen, then twenty trucks. On paper, that's success. In real life, I was the only person in the office. I was the dispatcher, the biller, the safety department and the night shift. The phone rang at 2 a.m., and I answered. Paperwork piled up. Maintenance slipped. My drivers deserved more attention than one man could give, and our safety score started to show it.

That scared me more than any diesel price.

So one night I started building something to help me watch over my trucks and my drivers. Just a small helper for safety and paperwork. But every problem I fixed showed me another one. Every bad day on a real load became a new feature. One became ten. Ten became fifty. The helper became a full system, and I gave it a name: Routy.

I tested it on my own trucks, with my own money on the line. I broke it, fixed it and broke it again. Four months after we switched fully to Routy, our ISS safety score had dropped from 88 to 60 (lower is safer). For the first time in years, I wasn't drowning.

My mentor was right. Once you're a trucker, you're a trucker.

I still am. I just work from the other side now, building the help I needed for every trucker who's still doing it all alone.