00:07 Welcome to Six-Figure Trucker, the podcast where we share advice on how to be successful in trucking and have fun while doing so. We’ll share stories, news, and advice on how to earn six figures in trucking, and we’ll speak to guys and gals that are already doing so. Next, it’s your host, Justin Scott. Let’s get to the show.

00:29 All right, guys. Welcome to the Six-Figure Trucker. I’m your host, Justin Scott. Here with me today, I have a special guest. Joe Bockenstette is with us today, and we’re very excited to have him on the show. Joe, how are you, sir?

00:42 Fantastic.

00:43 Great. How about yourself?

00:44 Oh, I’m doing great. I’m doing great. It’s Friday here at Norton Transport. I’m excited to roll everything into the weekend. No pun intended. But, you know, I just want to take a second and just say we appreciate you being on the show. I’ve got to meet you and then I’ve had multiple conversations with you on the phone and you know so many interesting stories that you bring to the table. So I can’t say enough about how thankful we are that that you’ve agreed to be on our show today and you know I’ll get started. Joe, you know tell us a little bit about you know your experience in the driveaway industry and how long you’ve been in the industry. Well, I moved to Oklahoma City in 199 late 1997. And the company I was working for in February of 98, I walked in and said, “It’s not working.” And I quit. And they said, “Fantastic. We’ll pay you for two weeks, and you can leave now.” And being 55 years old, self-employed all my life, I had to find something else to do.

01:46 And I’ve tried several places. I’ve had a CDL since literally the day I turned 21.

01:53 Oh wow.

01:54 And that’s 60ome years ago. But I went in places trying to get a job as a truck driver. And I was told, “You’re not a truck driver.” And the reason they said is because I had no history other than myself to prove who I was and what I could do. But I went to a place called Wagner or Wagoners. They used to do a lot of car carrying and boat carrying and they run oil field stuff from the Gulf up to Canada. They started a driveaway business putting out teams, three in a truck with a mother ship and hand booms that we loaded to pull one truck backwards with the front truck going forwards and we moved five trucks at a time with three people.

02:42 And that was the wild west. That’s what started it all. Mr. Wagner started it here. He did a lot of work. We moved a lot of stuff for Freightliner. That was the wild west. I did that. I was literally told at the time by a dispatcher that I was too old and they took me off of Two Ways and so I quit—

03:02 Of course.

03:03 And I went Andrea I went to work for an outfit that I my wife and I looked at it and we said it sounds too good to be true. But I went for worked for another outfit and I’ll tell you what, it was good and it was true. We were broke in 1998. We were stone broke. We started doing the driveaway. By the end of 1998, I had my bills paid and we actually had about $700 in the bank. So, this business has been really good for me.

03:39 Yes. Yes. But that’s how it started. And we started out with a hand loaded boom. What Wagner called I forget his name for it. I called a gravity boom. We started out with that and then when I went with Cold Iron, they provided us with a Walker wrecker boom. And that quite frankly was a nightmare. I never liked recorder boom. Have you ever driven one of those or seen a recorder boom in use?

04:07 Oh yes. Yeah, I have. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them in use many of times.

04:11 Well, we did it by putting a truck forward, pulling a truck backwards, and attaching our pickup as a third unit. So, we had to have multiples. And we didn’t have any problem with that. We just we were fat, dumb, and happy, and we did it, and we made money.

04:28 Yeah. Yeah.

04:29 And I did I didn’t like having that pivot point behind the bumper, so to speak. I could see that—

04:36 Because when you when you’re out of alignment, in other words, going around a corner, you’re being controlled by that back truck pushing you and it tries to tries to jack knife you if you slam on the brakes.

04:49 Oh, I could imagine.

04:50 So, well, I decided I’d build a boom, and I copied Mr. Wagner’s boom with my own changes and I had a deal on my pickup that I handled it so I didn’t have to lift anything. And my wife and I set out on the road and we did that from 1999 until I built the very first transport trailer in 2000.

05:16 So you know obviously there’s a lot of different types of ways to move trucks in the driveaway industry. And you know for our listeners a lot of you know we’ve had deck drivers you know on the show. We’ve had singles drivers on the show, but I think this is the first, you know, person that’s been experienced in the boom side of driving. So very, you know, early on in your career with driveaway, you were already moving multiple units at a time.

05:38 Yep. We were I was using a boom. I like the boom much better than a wrecker boom because it’s a real trailer back there. You go down the road straight, it’s like driving a— It’s like if you’d put a canvas shroud around the back end, it’s just another trailer.

05:54 Yeah. Oddl looking going down the road, but if you put a sack over it, it’d be just another trailer going down the road. Now, we pulled our unit, our pickups as a third unit, and I didn’t like that. I had multiple problems pulling my pickup back there. The last time you saw your pickup in a cabover was when you climbed in and closed the door of the front truck.

06:19 Yeah. You could there’s no way you could see it in any way, shape, or form after that.

06:23 No. And I was stopped once up in Indiana. Guy flagged me down and hollered at me, “Your pickup’s on fire.” And pulled over and sure enough, the bearing had gone out on the right rear wheel and it was on fire, literally.

06:40 Gosh—

06:41 That was fun. So, that’s what made me decide to make a trailer. Well, that’s what I was about to get into and that’s another reason why we’re excited to have you on because, you know, Boom Transport and multiple transport is a big piece of driveaway. It’s a big piece of what most driveaway companies do these days. And, you know, you’re such a special individual because you were in on the ground floor of the transport trailer concept. So, you know, all of these things that led you to 1999 and 2000 you wanted to make transport easier, more efficient, and so you decided to invent a contraption that that just simply did that. Is that where your mindset was?

07:23 Well, yes. When I got out of college, I went to work for a company in Topeka, Kansas, which is now out of business, called Henry Manufacturing. They made the first tractor-mounted backhoe. Ah—

07:36 And I designed heavy equipment. I designed back hoes.

07:40 Okay.

07:40 And my last backhoe was designed for Alice Chalmer’s when they were in business. We designed it specifically for them. It was an 18 foot dig and depth backhoe. So, I’ve always been around heavy equipment. When I was a kid in high school, I took every shop class I could get because I liked building things with my hands. And when I went to college, I learned to be an engineer. And I learned that, for this is my opinion now, if you can’t build it, you’re not a very good engineer. And it’s been proven to me many times, we had a guy working for us there who was an engineer, but wasn’t a he wasn’t a hands-on person. He actually designed tobacco that could not be manufactured. I mean, you could make one at a time, but it was too expensive. He had some welding processes that weren’t you couldn’t do.

08:34 Sure.

08:35 And so I used that expertise to design heavy equipment. And when I was doing the transport stuff, I thought, you know, I’d rather have my pickup not being on the ground. I’d rather have it up and just if I’m going to wear anything out, let’s wear the equipment out that I’m being has to move instead of wearing my equipment out. So, I talked to several people and I was told by several people in the industry that number one, it can’t be done. Number two, if you did do it, nobody could afford to buy it and nobody had wanted it. So, being a good German engineer, I decided I’d build it.

09:16 That’s the best inspiration you could have had, right? Well, one of the things you do when you design heavy equipment is you sit down and you get an idea of what you want to do and then how you want to do it. And I sat at the drawing table. Well, first off, I sit there in the truck with a lot of time on my hands going down the highway visualizing what I would make.

09:42 And then I get home and I would sit at my drawing table, which was behind the couch in the front room of our trailer house. My wife would be doing things, book work and knitting and crafting and whatever and we’d be watching sort of television and I’d be drawing. I went through drawing after drawing after drawing designing this thing. And I finally figured out there was a pattern. Kingpins are so far back, fifth wheels are so far off the ground. And suddenly it became real easy how to do it. I thought and then I worked around that it wasn’t as easy as I thought. I tried to do it with a straight trailer, but I couldn’t accomplish my end goals with a straight trailer. I could if I put a bend in the middle.

10:26 And so that’s the way all my drawings that I’d done up to that point, I just had to scrap them. I threw them away and I put the bend in the middle. And lo and behold, all my experience of doing the manufacturing of back hose and stuff, the with very minor changes, the trailer that the my last trailer I built was identical to the first.

10:50 Ah well, so up to that point though, I mean, how many drawings and how many designs would you say that you went through to get to that point? I had about a half a dozen 24 by 36 drawing sheets with quarter scale and eighth scale replications of straight trailers in different forms being on the trucks and how to roll a pickup up on them. And I liked none of them just didn’t do what it just looked awkward and clumsy and it just didn’t it wasn’t right. And then I started putting the joint in the middle. And I probably went through a half a dozen variations on that until I ended up with the actual joint that I used and the actual I-beams that that I used in the final the end process.

11:46 So it wasn’t something you did instantly. There were a lot of changes. I’m an engineer who believes that it’s easier to use my eraser on my pencil than it is to try to take a cutting torch and change a mistake that you should have caught early.

12:02 I would say not being an engineer, I would guess that that’s very smart of an engineer to do and less costly and less work for sure. But so so now you have this design. So you built it and then you brought it to market. How did that go? Tell me about that. Well, that’s an interesting story. I started out building a three-piece boom. I wanted a breakdown boom because I didn’t like the Wagner boom style that I had. I wanted a breakdown boom and I the Wagner boom was too difficult. It took a lot of finessing to make it work. Now, was it simple? Absolutely simple, but you had to work with it. It wasn’t an easy process.

12:47 Sure. And I thought I got to make this process easier. So I was going to make this breakdown boom. And I had I went to a place in Oklahoma City called Hendershot Tool which was oil field. And you know the oil field people one day it’s boom and the next day it’s bust. Well Hendershot the Hendershot company had this they were unique. They didn’t lay people off when the oil field went bust. They found something else for him to do. If they didn’t have anything for him to do, they were in the back lot playing basketball and they were getting paid. Mr. Hendershot’s philosophy was, why should I retrain people? Business always comes back. So, I figure out how to make enough money that when it is in the boom, I save my money and then I keep them on.

13:36 Well, these people needed something to do. And I went in and talked to Ed at the man that run the place. I talked with him and I talked with Jim, his man out in the shop that we needed to make this breakdown boom. Would they build it for me? And so we had all the pieces done and I was out on the road and I met a man named Richard Denu who was having as much trouble as I was in different places doing our job. He had an idea and we talked about it and I said I told him what my idea was and he thought about it and we met up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Three weeks later, we met delivering trucks out at Twilla, Utah. And Richard come up to me and he said, “I’ve been thinking about your design and mine. How much do you want for one of your trailers?” He caught me absolutely flatfooted because I’d made the original design. I had mainframe weldment drawings, but I hadn’t priced it out.

14:37 Sure.

14:37 And he said, “How much?” And I said, “I don’t know. Let me talk. Let me call Ed and see what he wants to do. So I called my partner Ed back at Hendershot Tool, told him what we were doing and I he knew about the trailer, but we were excited about the boom. It was going to be a new boom for driveaway industry, a new way of doing things, a breakdown boom that you could handle by yourself without having to have a hydraulic or any means. With the rack boom, you had to have an overhead hoist or a forklift to load and unload,”

15:11 Right—

15:11 The we’re trying to do something where you were self-contained and do it yourself.

15:18 So, the trailer idea, I’d talked that to him and he said, “Well, let’s do one thing at a time. The boom’s easier. Let’s do that.” Well, I called Ed and I said, “I got a manum to put money down. You want to build a trailer?” And he said, “Okay.” Okay. And I said, “You’ve seen the drawings. What do I tell him? How much?” And now don’t laugh too hard when I tell you, and this was in 2002. I said, “How much we should we tell him?” And Ed said, “Well, let’s at least make the material cost $10,000.” So, I went back out, got out of the truck, and went over to Richard and I said, “I don’t know. How about $10,000?” Okay. Oh boy.

16:01 That was it. When I got done there, we headed usually when we took trucks to Twilla, we actually had trucks out of there, and we did. And I got home and I went through my drawings, made copies of them, and took up and they started cutting the parts for the trailer. Now, we got the parts for the boom. The boom was never assembled. We went to work on the trailer. We got it done. Richard came in. We practiced loading it. Found out where the problems were. We had a couple of problems.

16:32 Sure.

16:32 And we had we fixed them and Richard got on the road and he was happy as a as I mean he just he thought it was great. He was out in Utah, different places unloading. He got to Fontana, California, and we did at the same time. And I watched him because I quite frankly I’d never used the trailer. I designed it.

16:59 Sure.

16:59 The use of how it worked was in my mind—

17:03 But I’d never done it other than that one time he was there. So my wife and I unloaded our trucks and here come Richard. And we just sat there and watched him. And when we got done, I said, “Richard, I got a deal for you. Are you on the way home?” Well, he said, “You sort of.” And I said, “You’re gonna take the trailer back to Oklahoma City. You’re going to drop it and you and my wife are going to go out in my pickup with my boom set up so that you can keep making money and we can and I can keep making money. She’ll take a single and you can take a boom set and we’ll make some money. But I’m going to take your trailer away from you because I can see where we got to make some tremendous changes.”

17:48 Ah, yeah. And we brought it back. I had two and a half feet to the front of the trailer. I took the manual hydraulic controls off of it and put selenoid operated electric controls on it and I rearranged and did some things at the back as to how we attached the back truck. Instead of hanging it on chains, I made a hydraulic tightening device that would tightening that would tighten the truck to the trailer more rigidly than swinging chains. And I kept it for I think we had it for a month while we did all the repairs to it. Changed the hydraulics. Did I mean we did a massive oversaul.

18:31 Yeah. Sounds like you guys did a lot to it.

18:34 Well, it was wrong. You had to change what was wrong before we built another one. And the problem is I had people wanting trailers—

18:43 And I said, “Not until I make sure what we got works.” Well, we made the changes. Richard took it back out and he pulled into the yard in Madina and a man named Jack Ethridge came in there was doing what I was doing. He had a breakdown boom pull his pickup as a third unit. He pulled into the yard at World Truck there at Madina. World Truck’s out of business now. They don’t do it anymore, right? But he pulled into the yard and he was undoing his boom setup when Richard pulled in past him, drove into the back part of the yard and Jack told me, he said when he came in there, he had blue trucks, I think it was. He said, “30 minutes later, I’m still trying to get unloaded and I got trucks to reload out of there.” And he said, “I’m still messing with unloading.” And this guy drives in, changes trucks, drives back out with white trucks instead of blue. And Jack said, “I stopped him.”

19:43 I got your name and address.” And he said, “The rest is history.” You know, within two hours, I was on the phone to you. And you told me how much you’re going to wanted for it. And I did tell him. I said, ” $32,000.” And within three days, he had driven to Oklahoma City with a check.”

20:01 Wow. And he said, ‘I want your number two trailer.’ And I said, ‘Well, mine’s the number two.’ He said, ‘N no, it isn’t. Mine is the number two trailer. You can have number three.

20:12 Oh.

20:12 And I said, okay. So, he had the number two trailer that had all the changes on it. A little side note, my wife and I had gone in there with our we were taking three I was taking two with the boom and then she was taking a single. We’ taken three trucks into the Freightliner dealer and it was raining and I just I stripped off I was down to a t-shirt and running shorts and my shoes. And I was out in the rain unloading because we’d waited for the rain to quit and it was warm and I said, “I’m already wet. I’ll just get wetter.” And I was out there in my t-shirt and running shorts and shoes unloading in the rain and I got soaked. We got done and of course the rain quit. The man down there come up to me and he said, “I watched you doing this and you really need one of those trailers like that fell Jack Eth came in here a week ago and I looked at him and started laughing and I said, “He got number two.

21:16 Number three is mine. You were supposed to have number two.

21:20 I was supposed to have had it and didn’t get it.

21:22 We had a lot of fun, my wife and I, that the breakdown boom that never got built.

21:28 We finished it and I made a place on the back of the trailer to carry it so that when my wife and I went out, we moved four trucks.

21:36 Absolutely.

21:37 And I’ll tell you, my wife, bless her heart, I lost her three years ago to breast cancer.

21:42 Oh, I’m so sorry. But my wife, we were together for 26 years. And in 2000, she was writing with me and that was totally against company policy. And she said, “I’m tired of sitting at home. I don’t can’t find a job. I don’t want that. I just sit.” I said, “We’re making enough money. I want to go with you.” So I had taken her with me and it was against company policy. We did that for almost a year and a half. And Phil Cold Iron found out about it and he said, “I’ll give you a choice. You’re going to get fired or you quit taking her with you.” And I looked at my wife and I said, “She’s always wanted to drive. If she gets her CDL why don’t just take her with us and she can drive.” And Phil Cold Iron in a fit of well, I don’t believe that she’s a woman can do this work. Yeah, you do that and I’ll put her on. Within three weeks, I had her CDL and well, she’s only to take a single.

22:45 You take the boom and she takes a single. Well, the first load out of the yard came from Bill Croy, who was partner with Silk Cold Iron, but a different operation. We had several offices then. He was out of Dallas. He called up and said, “Your wife is leaving there with a single. I’ve got a trailer. You take it and you drop the trailer in St. Joe and then keep going for your delivery in Morris, Illinois.”

23:11 Mhm.

23:12 Okay. So, she started out doing what she wasn’t supposed to do. She took a 30 a 53T trailer.

23:19 We got to Illinois and our next load was out of Kenosha, Wisconsin. We had something like 75 trucks up there that needed to be moved to Richie Brothers at Morris, Illinois out of Kenosha, out of the storage yard and in various places. There’s a big repo yard or whatever you call it up there at off of I-55 and we took some trucks out of there that had been, you know, sold as repos and stuff like that.

23:50 Sure.

23:50 But we had like 58 trucks and I forget how many trailers. And I told our dispatcher, I’ll the only way I’ll take any of them is you give them all to me. So my wife and I spent three weeks moving 78 trucks and I think it was 30 or 40 trailers to Richie Brother auction. That was baptism by fire. We had two trips a day with my wife through Chicago traffic on I-55.

24:17 What did she think of it after that? Was she ready to go home? No, she liked it. Wow.

24:24 Well, at first she was scared to death.

24:27 Sure. Yeah.

24:28 And when we hooked her up with a studio sleeper, you know, the Kenworth studio sleeper, which was the big— She walked up to that thing. That’s the biggest truck I’ve ever seen.

24:38 And she had a trailer that was a seven axle heavyduty rolloff. You know the kind of trailer I’m talking about.

24:45 Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That’s a hell of a way to start out.

24:48 Pull behind it. Well, we had that to pull behind it. And she was scared to death. She said, “That’s terrible. I’m I don’t know how to drive that.” And I said, “You’ll do just fine, my dear. You get in it and follow me.” We got down there and she said, “I could take my hands off the steering wheel. That trailer was the best load I ever pulled.” But what really got me is after I got the boom and my trailer, we would pull into a truck stop to fuel up and I would be first. She’d be following me and pull into the fuel island and pretty soon there’s at least five or six guys standing around. What? We’d never seen one of those.

25:28 Oh, I bet. Get that.

25:29 I bet you were turning heads left and right. Well, and I just I’d talk to them and tell them I built it and my wife would just quietly pull into the space next to me and these rough tough big old truck drivers would be standing there said, “Well, lookucky there. Here comes another one.” Well, lookucky there. That’s a woman driving. There’s a girl in there. That’s a woman driving. And my whole heart would just go pity patter because I knew she was better. She was a better driver than any of us there. Did I have more experience? Did they have more experience? Yes. But if you told my wife that that right front wheel should be two inches from the white solid line to prove that it wasn’t, you’d have to get out there with a micrometer and measure it while she was driving.

26:13 Oh, that’s awesome.

26:15 She was that good.

26:17 But that was the wild west.

26:19 I was going to say, but at this point, you guys are making good money, right? I mean, you quit your job. You moved on a driveaway. Now you’ve manufactured and engineered your own trailer. You’ve got your wife on the road. Money’s good at this time, right?

26:31 Oh, in 2005, we made almost I think it was like $400,000.

26:37 Wow. Wow.

26:39 Now, now there’s a lot of fuel expense in there.

26:42 Sure. Sure.

26:43 But we moved four trucks. You knew when you went to Tilla Freightliner had a repair a refurbishment facility where they took trucks that were sleepers because there wasn’t apparently enough dayc cabs. They took the sleepers off and they put a cap on the back of it and made a day cab with more room in it than a regular day cab.

27:04 Right. Right.

27:05 And I don’t know if you ever seen one of those, but I thought that that was one heck of an idea.

27:10 I’ve heard of a company that’s doing that now. I’ve seen there’s a couple companies I think that are still doing that.

27:16 Well, the Freightliner run into some trouble out there with Union. The union people started not doing their job like they should have. There was they got crossways with the company and the product at the last the product was not up to Freightliner standards and Freightliner got tired of fooling with them so they just quit it.

27:36 Ah and maybe that’s why these independent companies are out now doing it branched off and maybe had a hand in that. I don’t know. Who knows?

27:43 Well, with the a lot of the trucks like the 379s, Peterbilts, those trucks are real easy to convert to a day cab. In fact, Peterbilt has everything to do it to plug the hole. You take the camper off of it or whatever you want to call that, the sleeper. You take it off and they’ve got it. You just rivet the thing in there, plug the hole, and you got a window.

28:03 Oh, yeah.

28:04 So, it’s easy to do. But back in those days in the early 2000s, let me tell you, it was the wild west. And we’d pull through a scale, pulled into the Tallahassee scale down there on I 10. The young lady that ran the place walked out and I thought I was in trouble. She shut me down on the scale. I was sitting on the literally on the scale and the red light was on and I saw this woman and three guys. I think it was three or four people that walked behind her out the door and I thought, “Oh my god, what have I done now?” And this was like 2003. I just been on it just on the road. The paint was hardly dry on it. And she come walking out there and she said, “Don’t get excited. You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s just we’ve never seen anything like this. Would you mind if we looked it over? And I said, I wouldn’t mind at all. And I shut the engine off, climbed out of the truck and said, what can I tell you about it?”

29:06 And I showed her how it worked and what we did. And when we got done, she looked at it and she said, “Would you mind if we take pictures?” And I said, “I don’t care. Take all the pictures you want.” So they whipped out their cameras and when we was getting ready to leave, she said, “I have seen a lot of transport devices come through here. This looks to me like the safest, most secure way I have seen of doing what you do.”

29:33 Wow. Wow. And I had that repeated several times in the early 2000s with different— It’s kind of funny. I had this one state trooper stop me up in Pennsylvania as I was going through one of their rep booths, pulled me over and he said, “I’ve never seen one of these and I want to look at it.” I said, “Okay.” So, I get out and I walk around with him and he says, “Well, you got a kingpin back there, but it’s all tied up and you’ve got doubles and triples on your so it’s okay.” Yeah.

30:08 And I looked at him and I said and I thought in my mind, “What are you talking about? This is just a trailer.”

30:15 It’s just a— It’s a four axle trailer going down the road. It’s no doubles and triples.” But he said specifically, “You have doubles and triples on your license. So there’s you’re okay.” So we walked back to where the back truck was off the ground. And he looked at it and he looked at me and he says, “Would you tell me how that front fifth wheel up there that pivots is holding this back truck up?” And I looked at him and I said, “Magic.” And he looked at me funny and I thought, “Oops.””

30:48 And then he started laughing and he said, “You’re right.” He said, “One man’s science is another man is another man’s magic.” And I said, “That’s right.” And I explained to him how I did it. He didn’t comprehend it.

31:02 Sure.

31:02 He didn’t understand it. How he kept thinking that the front truck with that fifth wheel was holding the back. I guess he had that mindset that that was what was holding it up and those chains just were back there for no good reason. Maybe safety. So I don’t know. I don’t know what his mindset was and at that point I wasn’t about to change it. Yeah, it sounds like that could have you could have had a long conversation that may not have went anywhere going down that road with him. Well, so let’s fast forward. So now, so you know, you’ve got your trailers, you’ve engineered them. How many did you end up manufacturing?

31:44 I made nine of them.

31:45 Nine.

31:46 The ninth one never got assembled. Hendershot Tool. The man was tired. Ed was tired. His wife was tired. His wife was the daughter of Mr.

31:59 Hendershot—

32:00 And that’s how he was he got in there. He married her and he came in as general manager of the company and he ran it and he got tired of it. It was tired it was time to retire. National Oil Well came in there and offered him a lot of money. They had some patents. They had some things that they built for the oil field that nobody else could build apparently. And National Oil came in there and bought them out and I was told that we were done building trailers.

32:29 Wow.

32:30 And so the last ninth trailer was never built. As far as I know, I didn’t get back in time. They moved it to junk scraps pile somewhere. So I had eight trailers on the highway. And by the way, I still have eight trailers. And trailer number one is owned by a guy in Tennessee. And he’s got some issues with it. Not issues with the— Well, he’s got the trailer’s got numerous cracks, contusions in it, wells and stuff like that, but it was the very first one I built. I say back in here.

33:02 It’s 20 years old at this point, right? Or more.

33:04 Well, it’s 20 years old. Yes, we’re getting it back in here to take a look at it. We He needed new axle underneath it.

33:12 That trailer didn’t have the landing gear on the back that I put on my third trailer. And after all the ones after that, when I got out with my trailer, I learned what I was doing wrong. I was lifting the back truck up using my axle and wheels on the ground as the support for the trailer. Now, I knew I was overloading them, but I figured it’s just temporary and it’s not hurting anything. Well, it bent the axle.

33:36 Ah—

33:37 And it and so that’s why I decided to put the landing gear on it. And it was just another step, but it kept things from breaking. So, I put it in there and that solved all those problems. But the biggest problem I had with the last trailers that I built, you had to bring me $32,500 before I started ordering the first piece of steel.

34:00 Sure.

34:01 So, you had to have the money up front and then you waited for me to build it. And I still had people standing in line to buy them. Tom Dvalo was one of the people and Phil Cold Iron and Tommy Edmonson at Cold Iron were people that told me it can’t be done. And I said, “Okay.” And when I did it, Tom Deval come to me and trailer number one, two, three, four, five. Trailer number six. Trailer number six and seven. I was building two more trailers and he came to me and said, “I want to buy trailers for you. I want to buy two trailers cuz I want to put them out for my people. I said, “Okay.” We got the first ones and he and I gave him a special price for both of them. And his guy came in and picked the first one up and it left and went right straight to Philipsburg, Missouri, where they looked it and took it apart and decided if they were going to copy it or not.”

34:56 Oh, wow. Did you know that was being done?

35:00 Well, I knew that he had a trailer that bent in the middle. One of somebody who is relation to him and I don’t know his uncle or something like that built a trailer that pivoted in the middle like mine did but his pivoted down at the bottom with the cylinders up to the top where mine pivoted straight in line so that when you put my trailer straight it was straight all the way through.

35:24 But when you lowered it down it just pivoted from the center. It didn’t come apart. His trailer. The pivot was down at the bottom and the cylinder was up in line with the front and rear deck of the trailer. When that trailer extended, then the trailer front part of it pivoted down and it had to have a jump wrap in there to get you to drive your pickup from the front back to the back half. And the pin down at the bottom, my main pivot pin is a 2-in pin. His main pivot pin at the bottom was one inch. Ah—

36:00 And I knew that that wasn’t sufficient and they had trouble with it. It broke several times and they were looking at that trailer and comparing it to mine and they decided to build that trailer and the company in Phillisburg did build those trailers for a while but they beefed it up. They did a real good job of design of the trailer. They beefed it up and they built those for a while and then they ended up with the trailer that they have now which has a scissors lift in it. And it to me it just doesn’t quite do the job.

36:30 Sure. Sure.

36:32 I’ve talked with I talked to drivers that told me what the problem was and then I actually saw one down at Tuna, Mississippi. It just didn’t have under certain conditions with the right set of trucks. It didn’t have enough power on its own to raise itself up unless you had blocks and you raised it in increments. And I never un quite understood why this young man knew that he had to have those blocks under certain conditions and he drove off and left them somewhere. Now he’s trying to load in Tuna and he has to wait for the truck to come over after it got through Deckan. They had to come over and lift the front of his truck up trailer. Lift it up.

37:11 Lift it up. Yeah.

37:13 Yeah. And I found out that that was a problem that that Tom had with his trailers. But I thought that was interesting. Anyhow, Tom never did come back for the second trailer—

37:25 And he went out and started building his own trailers—

37:29 Between his trailers and I’m sorry.

37:32 Well, no, I guess so. So, I guess at this point, so you’re you know, you’re manufacturing trailers and, you know, you’ve got, you know, some folks that are high up in the industry. They’ve seen your trailer. They bought them. They want to know about them. But as they buy them, then they decide, okay, you know, I’ve got this design and I’m going to go out and we’re going to do our own design. And so that that and I guess that was just because of the pockets they had or whatever it may be.

37:56 Well, well, and the other thing of it is they put them out to their drivers at 500 a month, no money down, and forever to pay for them.

38:04 Yeah. And you couldn’t you of course couldn’t do that. I mean obviously—

38:08 I was a finance plan that I couldn’t come up with—

38:10 Right?

38:11 And nobody wanted to finance it because it was such a new industry.

38:15 Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You’re not going to get bank I mean banks are you know you get bank execs looking at they don’t know what the hell that is.

38:23 No. And quite frankly, a lot of people at the time when I started doing this, I heard more than once, if you can’t find the job driving a truck anywhere else, go do driveaway. And I met some of the people that were doing driveaway. And some of those people I don’t think should have be allowed to drive a truck, maybe not even drive a car. So we had some people out here doing what I do to have done that probably shouldn’t have been doing it. I ran into it over in Springdale, Arkansas with a Mr. Wolf in the shop over there moving Freightliners with Wagnars in two in 1998. We got in there and I was we were told you can load during the daylight hours. You have to cons you have to work with Mr. Wolf. And we’ve had drivers come in here and cuss him out. If he tells you to leave, if you don’t leave, we will call the police.

39:24 Wow.

39:24 And they were serious.

39:26 Yeah. I bet—

39:26 Because they’d had people and when we got in there, the first thing I did I’m a nosy guy. The first thing I did was talk to Mr. Wolf. And I said, “Understand that you’ve had some people in here that have not been nice to you.” And he looked at me and he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, we’re not those people. We don’t act that way. What can we do? We need our trucks. Where are they? We’re at your mercy.”

39:53 Yeah.

39:54 We got our trucks. We got them loaded. We went back in there two days later. The atmosphere had changed a little bit. We got our trucks and everything. We were back in there a week later and he said, “Come with me.” Grabbed me by the arm and said, “Come with me.” And we went over to the shop. And he went to the shop manager over there and he said, “This is Joe Bockenstette. If he and his crew come in here, they can load trucks at any time. They have my permission. You handle them. You take care of them. You do them justice. They’re the only ones that you can do it for, but you do whatever you have to do to get them in and out of here if I’m not here.”

40:36 That’s great. So you know, that’s the kind of impact that we want to see with our customers. And you know, you make a great point. That’s that that’s awesome.

40:44 Well, you do you remember when I said we wanted all of those trucks up at Kenosha?

40:48 Yeah.

40:48 I told the dispatcher, we negotiated the price. We were through with the negotiation and he said, “You don’t sound like a truck driver. You sound like a businessman.” And I said, ” you can’t be a truck driver without being a businessman.”

41:04 That’s absolutely true. And you cannot do what we do if you aren’t a businessman. You have to look at your profit and loss. And when companies ask you to do something and you know you’re not going to make a money off of it, at that point it becomes your choice. And since we’re contract drivers, it becomes my choice to tell you I don’t like the deal and I really don’t want to do it. Now, sometimes you will take deals like that because there’s nothing else in that area that moves you to another area where there is work.

41:39 Sure. Sure. You know, maybe this doesn’t this isn’t as profitable to me, but you know, this gets me to the next, you know, load that that will be more profitable—

41:48 But you may you have to look at it in the long term. You may not make any money on that. It may cost you all in expenses to make that trip. But if it puts you in the place where you make more money, you’ve done the right thing in my opinion.

42:03 Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, how long I guess you know, coming in the industry in the late 90s, how long did it take you to kind of understand that or was that something you just got right out of the bat? We’ve got, and I say that because we’ve got a lot of new folks in driveaway. We’ve got a lot of listeners that that are new to the game, I guess, for lack of a better word. So, you know, what are some pointers you can give some of the younger drivers or some of the drivers that age may not be young, but they’re new to the industry as a whole. So, you know, what are some tips you can give those guys and gals?

42:37 Well, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. You ever heard that expression?

42:41 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

42:43 When you go onto somebody else’s property to do a job, to pick up trucks, you are a guest on that property. How you conduct yourself is how you represent yourself in the company you work for. If you represent yourself as being a good person, doing your job professionally, things will come. It may take a while, but your job will be a lot better. You’ll be happier. You’ll get better results with your customers if you treat those people. You may be work you may be working for Norton Transport. You may be a contract driver for them. You may be contracted to several other companies, but when I’m contracted to whoever I’m contracted to, Norton Transport, I am the face of your company, I have to act responsibly because if I do something wrong, it not only reflects on me sort of, it will reflect on you. Absolutely.

43:43 Because you’re the one they’re having to pay.

43:45 Yeah. Tenfold. Absolutely. Tenfold. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and you know, people say dispatchers don’t have their favorites. If a dispatcher doesn’t have his favorites, the dispatcher is not doing a good job of watching his people. And you’re laughing, but he needs to pick out those people that do the job. Don’t complain. When you call in, you don’t say, “Haha, I’ve got a problem. What are you going to do about it?”

44:11 Yeah.

44:11 You call in and say, “I have a problem, and here’s how I’m going to fix it. I’ve got a flat tire. I found a place I can come and get it and it’s going to cost so much to do it. You tell me what to do.”

44:23 Yeah. And I say that because you know it’s this is a relationship industry from sales side to customer service to the to working with dispatch to everything. And you know we’re humans. You know we develop relationships and you just said it. You’ve created a great example of you know how you know that obviously what dispatcher what person is not going to love somebody more for helping them do their job easier and helping them you know manage a task you know it more efficiently. So you know you just put that example on the table and you know it was fantastic.

44:59 I love it.

45:00 When you’re dispatched to do a job call the people. You got a cell phone for God’s sakes. And cell phones are cheap. You got a cell phones. You get that dispatch from Norton Transport to go pick up a truck at the XYZ company in Philadelphia and you’re going to be a day out of doing it. Most places like a 24-hour notice. I don’t want to show up and find out that my truck is dead, sitting buried six trucks deep in the back because I lose money when I sit there and I’m only paid if the wheels are rolling. That does paid if it does me no good if I’m sitting. So, you get that dispatch, the first thing you do is get on the phone—

45:47 And you call the people up there at the XYZ place in Philadelphia. I’m going to be there 3 days from now at 10:00 in the morning. Now, here’s the kicker. You need to make absolutely certain that you’re there at 5 minutes to 10 when you tell them you’re going to be there.

46:05 That—

46:06 That’s the first thing.

46:07 That’s a kicker.

46:08 That’s the first kicker. You need to be there on time early, not late. If you’re going to be late through unavoidable circumstances, you have a telephone. Call the people. Don’t let them be surprised. Well, the guy was supposed to be here and here’s another one. It doesn’t show up. Get you get a bad reputation right off the bat and you can have a problem. You can have any about tire blowing. You can have any kind of a problem that slows you down. We’re moving old trucks. They can have a fuel filter that’s bad.

46:37 Tons of variables.

46:38 But there’s anything that could happen to you. You get this thing delivered and you’re going to pick up another truck. You call them while you’re still under load. I don’t wait to call you if I’m working for you. I don’t wait to call you while I delivered. Now, where am I going? You gave you give me a load today to move from point A to point B. I get loaded and I don’t have anything to do but sit in that truck and drive. The first thing I’m going to do is to call my dispatcher and say I’m going to be there at 10:02 tomorrow. What do you got for me after that?

47:12 Oh, that’s great.

47:13 Or I’m going to be there three days from now. And the dispatcher will say, “Well, that’s three days.” You say, “Well, yeah, you got plenty of time to find me something to do then, don’t you?”

47:23 You know, we’re a team. We’re a team. Those people, the dispatcher has no idea where you’re going to be or when you’re going to be there. And if you lie to them, it’s going to create a problem. Tell them you’re going to be there. And then you do everything in your power to make sure that you’re there on time. And treat your customers the same way. You’re I’m going to deliver at 10 10:00 tomorrow. I’m going to be there at 10:00 or die trying. I get this from being in business for myself. This is the way I want to be treated. If I’m— And you find out if you do this long enough, it’s you laugh, but it’s called karma. What goes around comes around. If you’re a nasty disposition person, it’s going to be you’re going to have trouble. But if you’re a person that goes in there with a good morning, sir, my name is Joe. I’m here to pick up a truck. I called you yesterday. And some of them will say, “Well, you’re the first one that ever did that and you’re the first one to be on time.” And that makes me feel good.

48:25 I’m out of the norm then, and I know that they’re going to remember me. Not all transport companies are the same. There are some of them that hire drivers that run their mouth when they shouldn’t, do things when they shouldn’t. They show up look unprofessional. It those people will make your customer think maybe I should pay more to have got the job done better.

48:50 Yeah. And I think that’s a good point. You know, you and it brings me to now what’s changed. You know, I think driveaway companies and obviously oursel included, you know, now there’s you so many different insurance companies involved. You know, driveaway has I think grown tremendously and will continue to do so. And I think you know, there’s a little bit more red tape in bringing on drivers. It’s not as easy as it used to be. There’s, you know, it’s not the wild west like it used to be. So, I guess for you, you know, being in it as long as you have, what are some of the things that you think have changed for the good in the business?

49:24 We seem to be getting more respect when we go in to pick up our trucks. We’re getting more help. So, my message of being a nice guy, I think other people have picked up on it.

49:36 Sure.

49:37 There’s a lot of good drivers out there. Yeah, I can tell when I go into a place that that there’s been good drivers there and I don’t have it. It’s better job. It’s just better. It’s just it’s a better atmosphere when I go in there. It’s not like, well, you’re back. What are you doing here? That kind of thing.

49:56 Right. Right. Well, I couldn’t agree with you more.

49:59 That’s the biggest thing. We could always use more money, but then look at our economy right now. There’s just no way that that’s going to happen. So, of course, who can’t use more money? You’re going to hear that from everybody. It’s—

50:12 Never enough.

50:13 One of the things that I look at what I’m doing, I am not I don’t have a mistress out there that I have to support. I don’t have a truck because that’s what that truck is. You say people want to be an owner operator. If you got operator, you just got yourself a mistress that you’ve got to take care of. And I see too many people that are owner operators that can’t manage their money. It’s— Yeah. Oh, I see it. I know. It’s tough.

50:39 I mean, just you have to manage your money. So, I would rather be doing this because I don’t have the repair bills when something goes south.

50:47 More flexibility. Absolutely. Well, I want to shift gears real quick. You know, this has been fantastic. We could have you on the show again, Joe. I think we could—

50:58 One thing. Can I throw this at you in so—

51:01 Please. Please. I had a driver that said, “I’m never going to buy fuel at Lo’s because they’re watering the fuel. I put fuel in there once and the truck had a problem.” If you hear somebody say that, you want to first thing you want to do is that person’s had a problem with a fuel filter.

51:19 Yeah.

51:19 We’re picking up trucks that the last thing that people do when they’re turning in a trade truck is follow up on their normal maintenance. The last thing they do is change a fuel filter. So, you’re going to have a problem with the fuel filter. And this guy that was complaining about Loves, I looked at him and I said, Loves that. I said, you’re full of prune juice. Loves has the best filters just like everybody else does. What you got was a truck that had been sitting with a tank not quite full of fuel, maybe quarter of a tank. It got condensation, it got water in it, and it plugged up the filter.

51:56 Yep.

51:56 It happens all the time. So, one of the things I like these filters that you can see through when you start that engine up, if that filter is more than half full, you know you’re going to have a problem. You need to call your dispatcher and say, “I need to get a fuel filter changed.” I don’t know any dispatcher or any company that if you tell them you have a fuel filter problem, won’t let you go get a fuel filter. And I know that the people that own the truck will be happy for it. Oh, they’ll be great. If you have to do a well, if you have to do a service call out there at the side of the road because a fuel filter went south on you, that fuel filter that was a $25 or $30 job is now several hundred.

52:35 Absolutely. That that just went up and the attention to detail like that is awesome because you know I’m you know being in front of you know I try to sell our brand our company to potential customers and you know I’ve heard you know that that particular scenario not necessarily but there’s so many different things that our customers wish they would have because they can’t see these trucks. Sometimes they buy them and the person they’re buying from will paint this picture and then we send our drivers in and it’s a whole another picture and the first person to lay eyes on it for the customer is the driver. So reporting that type of stuff is can be helpful. I think some folks think they’re doing you know it’s negative to report that stuff and it’s not. You know a lot of times our customers don’t know that. They don’t know the condition of the truck.

53:20 Let me tell you a quick story. You might want to work this in later.

53:24 Please. I picked my wife and I picked up four tractors in somewhere in Minnesota, I think it was. Those tractors had been sold from a company who hauls boats. Those tractors had been sold to an individual who bought them who sold them to a guy down in Missouri.

53:43 Yes—

53:44 We got those trucks and there were several things I noticed that were wrong with them. On those Peterbilts, there’s an angle across the back that has the airlines and stuff that comes off the truck to hook into the trailer. They were all loose. There were other things that were wrong with these trucks. There were contusions, dings, and dents on them. So, before we left, I took my cell phone out and I took pictures. And I do this a lot. When you pick up a truck and it isn’t absolutely like a new truck, take pictures of the damage. If you take pictures of the damage, when you deliver that truck, now it’s somebody else’s problem and not yours. When we got those trucks down to the dealer in Missouri and he walked out to him, I could tell there was something wrong. He had a look on his face of I want to kill somebody. And I started— Oh, he was mad.

54:37 And I was talking to him and he finally said, “What in the heck did you do to my trucks?” And I looked at him and I said, “Here’s pictures that were taken before we left up there and they’ve been sent a date and timestamped with my dispatcher. They were taken before we left.” And I said, “The man that helped us load those we picked those trucks up from as we were pulling out, he ran alongside the truck and the back truck, he kicked the tire and you ought to have seen the look on his face. It was absolute joy that this truck was leaving him.” I said, “This man was so happy to see that truck go because it had caused him nothing but problems.” And he said, “This isn’t a picture of the truck that I got when they sold them to me.” He said, “One of them is, but they were all identical trucks.” He said, “One of them is pretty good, but the others are not.” And I said, “Well, that’s not my fault.”

55:32 No. No. And that happened.

55:35 This man was ready. The contusions and bumps and stuff on those trucks. This man was ready to put off on me. But—

55:43 And if I hadn’t taken those pictures to protect myself and you— Yes.

55:48 We’d all been having a different conversation.

55:50 Yes. And that’s such a great story because that matters so much. You know, I call it CYA. Call it whatever you will, but you know, you knowing the condition and reporting that condition is so important because there’s so many people that get these trucks that have been either deceived by the person they’re buying them from or you know, some may not be as you know, truthful about the situation as we would think they would be. So, CYA, you know, we’re all in this together and make sure that we do what we can to protect ourselves. I love it. I think that’s a great example of how you’re supposed to do it. My wife and I picked four trucks up from a place in Louisiana, Pearlman or something like that at a gas place, some kind of a gas place. We picked these trucks up and they were pretty rough. And for Aerot Trucks to have bought them and sold them to this guy, they were really rough for Aerot Trucks. But I thought, hey, the guy bought them, he knows what he’s getting. We got on the road and I called the guy and he said, “How do they look?”

56:52 And I said, “Well, they’re really rough.” He said, “Excuse me, what? What do you mean?” And I said, “They’re rough.” I said, “One of them had to have the hood put back on it when we were there. There’s a lot of contusions.” He said, “They’re not supposed to be that way. Those are supposed to be prime ready to move trucks.” By the time we got them to the Manchester freeway place for Aerot Trucks, this guy had been in touch with Aerot Trucks. The people at Aerot Trucks had got a hold of the people that sold them to him. And there was going to be some talking because these trucks did not meet the picture that this guy had. They’ taken a picture of one truck and told him they all four looked like that.

57:33 Wow.

57:34 And he and Aerot Truck took them back. Aerot Trucks.

57:37 Good. They took them back.

57:39 Good for them.

57:40 They did. They took them back from the guy and they told the customer that they bought them from that you’re going to get your trucks back and you’re going to get to pay to have them delivered to us and back to you.

57:50 Now, I’m glad they did that. That’s what we need companies like that to stand up against that cuz that’s the only way it’s going to stop.

57:57 Well, yeah, but this— So, if you got a cell phone, and everybody has a cell phone, and every cell phone has a camera for crying out loud. And if they don’t, you can buy your if you don’t have a cell phone. If you don’t have a camera, you can buy a point and shoot, carry it with you. It doesn’t cost anything. Take much pictures. If you got them on your cell phone, you can send them to the dispatcher and say, “This is broke. Here’s what it is. When I get to deliver it, it’s not my fault.” But you got to do that. You got to do that before you pick them up. So that their date and timestamp and a location in the yard where you’re picking them up.

58:30 Exactly. No. Exactly. Well, I love it. And I hate to cut us short. I know we could we’ve got stories. I think, you know, this is opening me up to chapter two with Joe because I think we could have a good old time sharing stories, but there is one question that I have to get to that’s not driveaway related really, but it’s always something that I have to ask. Because I’m a foodie. I love to eat. I love hearing what our drivers are eating. Going where you’ve gone, being where you’ve been. What is one of the top places that you enjoy visiting that you don’t get too much or you do get to often that you like to eat at and you want to tell our drivers that are on the road about it?

59:06 The Shepherds. It’s a hotel and restaurant in Clearwater Beach, Florida. If you want a good place for seafood, at least the last time I was there, they had a seafood buffet that was to die for. If you like fresh oysters, I about cleaned them out of them. Fresh oysters.

59:24 Shephardds is the name. They’re in Clearwater Beach, Florida.

59:27 That place will always be a favorite. One other place that’s a favorite is in Saddlebrook. I think it’s New Jersey. Anyhow, it is a place called the Versail Diner. You know, diners up in the Northeast are there. We think of a diner where I live in Oklahoma as a place where it’s kind of a dump.

59:47 Yeah. Yeah. At the ver at the Versailles Diner. The Versailles Diner in Saddlebrook. You’re served in Black Thie and Tales.

59:57 Oh, wow.

59:57 It’s a formal place and the food is to die for. Those are two places that I my wife and I always made a stop when we ever got near either one of them, we would go there.

1:00:08 Well, I love that. So, Shephardds and Clearwater, Versail Diner in New Jersey. What part of New Jersey was it?

1:00:14 Saddlebrook, I think it is.

1:00:15 Saddlebrook. Saddlebrook and Clearwater Shepherd—

1:00:18 You get your money’s worth.

1:00:19 Well, that’s great to know. And you know, all of our folks out there, I love talking about where there’s good places to eat when you’re on the road and a lot of these places you don’t get to go to often. So, Joe, I want to thank you. I had a great time and I think I hope we can do it again and enjoyed you being on the show and you shared a lot of great information and I know this information is going to be neat to hear from our listeners out there that are in driveaway and some that are not in driveaway. So, I want to thank you again. Well, I always tell everybody on my emails, be well and do good things. And I’ll tell you, do be well and do good things. And all the people out there, remember that we’re all brothers in this. Be well and do good things.

1:00:58 I love it. I love it. That’s great. That’s a great end to leave it on. Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it so much. Six-Figure Trucker is brought to you by Norton Transport. Norton Transport is a driveaway trucking company that customers can rely on. It offers excellent independent contract driving opportunities for professional, courteous, qualified drivers that can provide the kind of service we deliver. If you’re interested in learning more about Norton or just want to subscribe to the show, check out Six-FigureTrucker.com. That’s Six-FigureTrucker.com.