Post by FreightWaves

From the Inside Out — How Trucking Became the Way Back | The Long Haul Debon Sims — DJ — got his CDL in 2018 and bought his first semi-truck in 2019 after getting out of a lease-purchase program. What the intake form doesn't say is what came before that. DJ has been incarcerated. He knows what it feels like to have the system count you out. He also knows what it feels like to decide that the count doesn't matter. He landed an Amazon contract early on. Lost it. Spent years grinding load boards and chasing freight that barely covered his costs. And then three years ago he did something most carriers only talk about — he walked away from broker dependency and secured a direct waste-hauling contract that changed not just his revenue, but how he sees the entire business. This is a conversation about what it actually takes to build something when the world has already decided what you are. About treating trucking like a business when everybody around you is treating it like a job.

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