00:06 I tell every driver that I’ve ever worked with that, you know, is asking me advice, number one thing, before you sign up on a load, do your homework. Know where you’re going. Know how you’re going to get out of the place you’re going to when you deliver and where you’re going to next. And you will find that you will save yourself a lot of headaches down the road.

00:29 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. Let’s get to the show.

00:49 Hello everyone and welcome to the Six-Figure Trucker brought to you by Norton Transport. And each and every one of you, if you join us each week, you know, this is a format, this is a space where we elevate and celebrate the drivers of America, particularly those of Norton Transport that obviously they make our company successful and we just want to pay tribute to them and just lift them up in this space and that’s what we’re doing. And we have a very special guest who is with us this evening, Mark Nichols. Mark, how are you?

01:20 Good, John. I’m good. In Sacramento, California. I’m up in a fire tower right now watching. Make sure there’s no fire started.

01:28 I gotta I gotcha. What part of California again were you saying you were in?

01:32 Sacramento.

01:33 Okay. You’re in Sacramento. What’s it like there right now? What’s the weather?

01:37 About 60°, sunny, wind calm, so no fires. So I guess everything’s good.

01:43 Those have been devastating, man.

01:45 Yeah. I wouldn’t want to be down there. And there was actually I think there was a load on the load board going down that way. And I’m like, “No, I think I’ll stay out of there for a while till they figure out what they’re going to do.”

01:56 Yeah, I don’t blame you for that. Now, we were talking earlier before we started got on the podcast here. You have your own podcast.

02:06 Yeah, I started my own podcast. I used to be one of my many jobs. I used to be a newspaper reporter. Once I got out of the Gulf War, I decided to go ahead and get out of the army when it came time I was wasn’t going to reup. So I applied for a newspaper job as a reporter at a small town in Tennessee called Lawrenceburg and I worked for Lawrence County Advocate down there. I think I worked there for about four to five years, something like that. And I worked as a newspaper journalist and so I learned how to write, learned how to put together a newspaper and of course I always put the newspaper together when my editor Nancy Brewer, which probably Nancy Brewer is probably one of the best bosses I ever had. She taught me a lot, was very patient with me. I was always a bad speller and she worked with me to get me up to up to speed on spelling. I you know, words like a lot always gave me a lot of trouble.

03:10 I couldn’t remember which way they were supposed to be spelled.

03:12 Yep, I got you.

03:15 So, anyway, I developed that skill of being able to write, gather on news, put together a paper. While I was serving in that position I got a chance couple times with a local radio station, which was right across the street. They anytime they held political debates and stuff, they would always ask me to be on the panel of questions during debate. So I got a chance to do a little bit of public speaking and feel comfortable in front of a mic speaking in front of people. I went from that job to everything else and you know that that job was really a job that you know transitioned me into being able to do more public related jobs, sales jobs and things like that. So got—

03:57 It was a good learning experience. Well, you and I, as we were talking about, we can certainly relate because before I got into my position now as an account manager with Norton Transport, I was a journalist as well. Worked for 31 years in the broadcasting business. And you and I both know in journalism, which a lot of people don’t realize this. They think it’s a glamour job, but it if you like working long hours, weekends, and no pay or very little pay, go ahead and get into journalism. Yeah, you get your name in the paper, you know, your name is underneath the headline of the paper says by Mark Nichols, but you know, other than that, it’s what like you said, it’s low pay, a lot of work.

04:41 But the other side of it, I mean, not to be pessimistic about it, but the other side of it, you get to see a lot of things, experience a lot of things, and understand a little bit more about humanity.

04:52 Yeah, you do. And you know, you come across some good stories every once in a while, too. You know, I mean, my the beat that I covered was the courthouse in the city administration building. So, I covered a lot of crime stories. You know, somebody would break it, you know, you know, there I had a daily meeting with the on Monday through Friday basis with the sheriff, me and the other reporters and he would, you know, basically tell us what bad things people did the day before and he give us some stuff to write about. You know, it’s a daily grind covering all of that. But, you know, sometimes I would get out and tell just personal interest stories and I’ve come across some good stuff and every now and then. So, you know, it’s a good job. You know, I don’t think you’re not going to raise the family on it or anything else, but it will give you some experience that will lead you to a better job somewhere down the road.

05:40 Sure. Which basically led me to my podcast when right before co I you know I was at the house and wasn’t driving much and I was I want to do something and I was watching a lot of podcasts on YouTube and things like that and I was just watching you know these shows and I’m like well I could do that and you know so I bought the equipment had Amazon delivered package after package at the house and basically set up a studio in the second bedroom of my town home and just basically learn how to during co learn how to put together a podcast and interview people. I do already knew how to do that. So it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be cuz you know the transition from a newspaper to a podcast pretty easy.

06:27 Yeah. It’s called the Mark Nichols podcast and that’s Nichols Nic Hols.

06:32 Yeah. I also that podcast is available on Spotify and Apple podcast and I think it’s on Google podcast too. I mean, it’s part of the once you’re on one podcast, you’re on every other everything because it all— Yeah. All goes to kind of a central database and all the other podcasts collect from it. So—

06:51 But I also have a Substack page, too. What I do is some lighting as well.

06:55 Gotcha. Now, on your podcast, do you talk about your profession as a driveaway truck driver? I’ve mentioned it during interviews a little bit, but my podcast really focused on local people there in the Lawrence County area because, you know, we had two newspapers there, but you know, they one of them I used to work for was Lawrence County Advocate, but the readership has fallen out so bad on those papers that, you know, they’re just about out of business and everything. And that’s not anything abnormal because that’s happened across the United States with newspapers.

07:31 Mhm. So, what I wanted to do with the podcast was interview local people that probably would not appear in the paper because, you know, when you have a local newspaper, you’re usually understaffed. You got one, maybe two reporters and they can’t cover everything—

07:50 Right?

07:50 And a lot of times they’re the things they cover is pretty much fit to them. You know, they’re just retyping stuff in is basically what they’re doing. They might have a time to get out and drive their car somewhere and make an interview or something, but you know, usually the reporter may be the editor as well and maybe the layout person and doing everything you doing three or four different jobs maybe doing some ads, you know, creating some ads. So, they can’t cover anything other than just a little bit of a news and it’s usually governing related, something going on at the courthouse or something. So I wanted with my podcast to get into interviewing local people talking about things doesn’t get talked about in the paper.

08:31 I gotcha. Sounds like you got a pretty good niche there. How often does your podcast air? Does it come on every week or is it spontaneous or how often does it come out?

08:41 It was I tried to put out something about every two to three weeks. And problem I run into is at that time was all the technology was kind of new in podcasting really if you didn’t have and this is during COVID so you really couldn’t bring someone into an office or something and interview them because everybody was locked down—

09:05 Right?

09:06 So you had to do it over the phone like we’re doing now. And a lot of times you would have a person call into your podcast and they’re out in Lawrence County in the rural area in the country so to speak and the sales service is not very good. So—

09:22 You know you’re trying to do an interview and their cell phone is popping and going in and out, you know, and that was a challenge right there is getting the technology to work right.

09:31 Calls dropping and you can’t understand. Yeah. Yeah. That would be tough. That would be tough certainly. And I’ll tell you, a lot of people really think they can get on a mic because they’re used to talking and everything, but once it gets down and like I remember interviewing the lady that’s over the women’s shelter there, battered women’s shelter—

09:54 And I was doing interview with her—

09:56 And it was just a it was a just her saying what she had said in other interviews on other people’s podcast and you know, nothing new and I was trying to pull out information from or try to pull out something that was a little bit different. And you know, some people just can’t get that intimate on a phone conversation or an interview where they can’t get off the, you know, the script, so to speak—

10:23 Right?

10:24 And that was always tough on the podcast is getting people that I had known to get more—

10:31 Personal—

10:31 Into personal stuff, you know? Yeah. And—

10:35 That’s the key of a podcast.

10:36 That’s the key is pulling that information out of people. I mean, you have to learn to me, I mean, as a journalist myself, the one of the key skills in interviewing is the simply listening.

10:49 Yep.

10:49 Now, I wanted to ask you a little bit on seven years with Norton Transport, obviously on the road, Class A driver. You’ve probably I’m guessing seen all of the country—

11:00 Many times over and over and over.

11:03 Is there any part that really takes your breath away or has made a memory for you? There’s some town like if you go into let’s say you go into Ohio and that area where I think is the Ohio River but you’ll see some towns like along that river that were it been there forever and you I can remember some places and some towns where the downtown is an old school downtown with a lot of older architecture, a lot of what I called the Craftsman homes or even some stairs of Robux homes and everything. And the downtown buildings have a lot of deep detailed exteriors on the crown and everything else where you know you can tell every the buildings have not been demolished and metal buildings put up in their place. These are buildings that have been there since the 20s, not 1920s or 1930s and they’ve been well taken care of and painted and you know they’ve been occupied. Have been used.

12:04 So obviously they’ve been kept up and those are some of the really coolest towns you’ll ever go through and you’ll just it’s almost like going back in time to where you know this was back in the days of something I guess you would see on a Hallmark car from 1930s or something.

12:21 I gotta nice American—

12:24 Yeah. And I just finished the trip up delivering some trucks over from Buffalo over to the New Hampshire, Vermont area. And I got a chance to go through like the Green Mountain area—

12:38 Over there. And you got a lot of small towns through there that have not really been touched. And you know, they’re they are tourist towns, but they have not been overdeveloped with stuff. It’s still a lot of the charm and the downtown area and the little shops and everything. I like that stuff to me because it’s it cuz most places you go to in the United States, it’s strip malls. It’s same building, same stores, same metal building—

13:07 You know, same overdevelopment. Yeah, it’s a lot more intriguing to go to places you’ve described, hamlets, if you will, villages, kind of iconic places from days gone by.

13:19 I mean, and me personally, I like places that have good architecture.

13:25 Mhm.

13:26 And not just a square building put up or something, you know, and it’s a lot of places, you know, they tearing down the architecture and just putting up, you know, commercial style buildings. They have nothing interesting to look at. So, you know, and plus you, you know, you go to some of those old rust built towns and you’ll see some churches there that are, you know, that just were magnificent built churches that were, you know, built 100 years ago or two maybe 150 years ago.

13:55 Mhm.

13:56 And you know, and I just I you know, I’m driving down the interstate and I see these churches and I’m like, boy, I really would like to take this truck. I’m driving and go to that church and just put the stereot but you can’t because you just got to keep driving. You got, you know, but I’m always that that always catches my eyes when I’m running around the country.

14:18 What kind of truck are you in right now?

14:20 I just delivered a box PKY box truck today out of Kent W Kent Washington and bought it down to Sacramento. Those are just a transport truck.

14:29 And you had a bigger truck before that one leading you to the G greater Kent area. Is that right? Yeah. The one I delivered before that was a dump truck, a used huge dump truck out of Liberty. Was it Liberty Value? Liberty Lake out of Spokane.

14:47 Yeah, Liberty.

14:47 I took it over to you.

14:48 Yeah, that’s one of my accounts. That’s what I know. It was I think they call that a super dump. It’s a big truck, wasn’t it?

14:54 Yeah, it was. Yeah, it had all kinds of attachments on it. It was a weird one, though, too, because they had two of them there. The sales agent in summer, Washington, bought the trucks out of Idaho, and I guess they took them there to Liberty Lake to have the inspection done on them. And he was using us to get the two trucks to his location.

15:18 Mhm.

15:19 And I got there one day, picked up the first one that he wanted, and I said, “I can’t leave out right now cuz I got a I’m an hour.” I took a hotel break that night and I went back the next morning to get the truck and start driving it. And when I got I was eating the breakfast that morning and Rachel called me, my dispatcher, and said, “No, they don’t want the back truck. They want the other one.” And—

15:43 I’m very well aware of that because the night before which you going to get the motel or the hotel for the night that was a blessing in disguise because I got the call that night before and switch the VINs knowing that you were going to be taking a set of keys and exchanging them for another one. But from what I understand they were pretty much the same type truck.

16:05 Yep. And I don’t know if you I don’t know if that gave you the information, but the reason why all of that happened is while those two trucks were at Liberty Lake being inspected, one of the sales guys there sold one of the trucks.

16:18 I did hear about that. I did.

16:21 Yeah. He stole it. He stole it out from underneath the guy in—

16:24 Yeah. Which made him very mad.

16:27 Yeah. He was not real pleased when I talked to him. He’s— That’s a funny story, though. I mean—

16:33 He was not pleased when I talked to him on the other end and either.

16:37 Yeah, it’s you know, trucking’s an interesting business as we all know.

16:42 Yeah, it’s but I’m like, “Yeah, lucky I like you said, I’m lucky I didn’t take off the night that day because that whole thing would have been a disaster. I’d probably been driving the truck back to Liberty Lake.”

16:52 Yeah. You’d probably still be in Washington and not in California. But, wanted to talk about you’ve had some interesting professions. Obviously being a journalist being a trucker on the open road as a drive by trucker and you’ve done some other things that are very intriguing and the one that caught my eye the most when we were talking before we got on the show. You were a ballroom dance instructor.

17:19 Yes, I was. That’s probably the long I would say that’s one of the long probably the longest job I had.

17:25 How does one fall into that? How do you become a ballroom dance instructor? When I was a newspaper reporter in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, working for the advocate I rented one night I rented a Fred a Steer movie Fred a stair and Ginger Rogers and Top Hat.

17:44 Mhm.

17:45 Because I’ve always liked dancing. So I just out of a whim I l that movie throw it on the shelf and I rent it to it and watched it and Fred St’s choreography you know that he did in that movie the RKO picture from 1932 I think it was during those pictures where Fred Astaire was dancing he choreographed the routine along with his assistant choreographer Hermes Pan which I think Hermes Pan was I want to say he was from Tennessee But I’m not sure. But anyway, that was he’s just a ch and anything Fred Astaire danced in movie those two guys choreographed it. You know, Fred Astaire would do his part and her knees against the woman’s part and that’s how they worked out the routine and then Fred Astaire’s the leading lady would come in a few months later with the routines already worked out and they would dance themselves.

18:41 All of that kind of intrigued me and I love the dancing part and I you know I did a little bit of dancing in high school. I was a basically a I guess you might say a break dancer in high school.

18:53 Okay.

18:54 So I wasn’t like I said I was never afraid to get up on the stage and do something perform or say a speech. I it’s just probably one of my few gifts in life. So, I was watching those movies and I just got the idea one day typing out a story. I’m going to take some ballroom dance lessons. So, I looked up the nearest ballroom dance studio, a Fred Astaire, and it was in Nashville, which from Lawrenceburg is only about a 70 mile ride, so it’s about an hour and a half.

19:26 Mhm. So I went up there and I started taking lessons and the guy that owned the studio up there, his name was Ben Ermis. You can Google him. He him and his partner Shalene Archer were five time United States smooth dance champions. I mean they got they were in the movie Shall We Dance. One of the couples that competing on the floor. Very very well known in America if you’re in the ball against—

19:57 Extremely talented too it sounds like.

19:59 Yeah, they work hard on them. I mean I’ve watched them been during their practice session. I mean it’s you know they deserve anything they’ve got. So I went up there was taking dance lessons and I saw Ben I’m like man he looks really cool. He can dance. He knows, you know, he just really cool looking guy. I want to do this. I want to quit writing stories and putting together newspapers. I want to become a dance instructor. I think I would be good at. He says, “Well, I don’t have any openings right now, but let me call a friend of mine at the Fish Air School in Memphis, Tennessee. He would take you on and I’ll put in a good word for you and you can go get into his teacher school.” You know, because you got to know when you go into FT school, you got to go through a teacher school basically to learn how to teach the first six yeah, first six lessons.

20:51 And so Tom said, “Yeah, bring him on down. I’ll take a look at him.” And I drove from Lawrenceburg over to Memphis and set for an interview. And he liked me, you know, he said I was cleancut. I could speak well, carry myself well, I stick to. So yeah, he would take a chance on. So he put me in teacher school, which lasted about a month. And about the third week of teacher school, he comes to the practice room where we were doing our schooling. And he said Nichols and he had a jacket because at his school you had to wear a shirt tie and a coat.

21:31 You had to look professional. You just couldn’t walk out there, you know, a pair of shorts.

21:36 And he said, “Nicl, he was holding a coat, a blue blazer that on the right sleeve that was torn with it was kind of threadbear a little bit. This blue blazer was his from about 10 years prior.”

21:51 Okay. And he said, “Nichols, I he handed me the jacket.” He said, “The teach in one hour.”

21:58 You were kind of thrown into the fire there.

22:00 He said, “Yeah, I got a student coming in. Her name was Marsha Mitchell. Remember heard of this day and she was a school teacher and she came in and that was my first student. And I taught her first lesson. And I taught it for the I guess for the four or five years I was at that school. So,”

22:23 How many first student I ever got was probably my longest class student.

22:27 How many years were you an instructor—

22:29 At that school? I was instructor for about four to five years and then I moved to Nashville and I worked for Ben and Shalene at that school up there for about the same time period and then I had my own school down in Florence, Alabama. And I’ve always had a I’ve always kept contact with Dennis Shelini. You know, I you know, if I wanted to go teach, well, if they had a studio today, I could teach for them if I wanted to. I just had to call them up and say you got a spot for me and I could, you know, order a pair of ballroom dance shoes and take off and go.

23:06 Gotcha.

23:07 Because in a ballroom dance world, you learn to cheat. You learn to dance. But one thing you do learn to do is sell lessons because if you don’t sell a lesson in a bald dance video can’t pay the rent.

23:20 That’s true. That’s true.

23:21 Well, and you’re selling, you know, you learn to sell. You learn to pres make a presentation in front of somebody you’ve never met because teaching selling a bowl and dance lesson is very difficult because you can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell it, you can’t put it on, you can’t. It’s an invisible item you’re trying to sell. You’re trying to sell them the future. You’re trying to sell somebody, hey, take these lessons and this is what you’re going to look like in the future. That’s a very difficult sale to make.

23:53 You’re selling an ideal, a dream, I guess, you know, sort of a—

23:57 Yeah, you’re selling a dream. You’re selling something futuristic that that that they can’t put their hands on and look at, smell it, and see it. So, I’ve always said baller structures are the best sales leaders out there because they have the hardest sell. You know, somebody’s selling a car, you can get in the car, you fill the interior, you fill the steering wheel, you drive it around the block, you know, and you get out and look at it, you know, that’s an easy sale.

24:21 Mhm.

24:22 Selling something you can’t see, it’s tough, but—

24:24 You got to be creative.

24:26 You can. And also, you know, you’re a young guy, 20 years old, and a lot of times the students you have are 40, 50, 50. Now, there are young students, too. But, you know, you’ve got a big different of age range there of women that you have to in just a short amount of time make a connection with teach them enough to where they can move around the floor and you have to say, “Hey, this is what we’ve done in these amount of lessons. This is what we could do in this amount of lessons.” So, you try the lessons and you try to keep them in the studio long enough where you can really teach them how to dance. Mhm. Now—

25:04 And it’s tough.

25:05 I got you were telling me earlier too, you fell into a position with Dwight Yoakam. How did that happen?

25:13 Yeah. When I was teaching in Nashville with Ben and Shalene. There was, you know, you have a teacher room in any studio where the teachers are, you know, they’re they gather in there. They’re calling the students. You, you know, it’s just it’s kind of like a communal office for just the teachers. I got you.

25:33 And we were in there, me and one male teacher and another and a female teacher. And the male teacher name was Danny. And he had said something to me like he was going to try out for some sort of a show or something that he was going to do and I said and I just made the comment, “Hey, I’m I should do that, too.” He said, “Oh, you can’t do that. You can’t do that.” Like, you know, he was better than me. And I was driving home that day and I heard on the radio that they had open auditions at the Opera Land not at the hotel, but there’s another place around the Opera Land Hotel at the time. And they were having open auditions for Dwight Yoakam performance coming up to be on the CMA Awards.

26:25 So I answered the call, called him up, gave him my name, put me on the list. I’ll go in and try out. Went there. I think it was on a Wednesday. And the wife of course was not there, but his choreographer, if you remember when he come out with a song, Crazy Little Thing called Love. That was shortly after the there was a the Sweden dance craze was very popular back in the late I think it was late 90s or something in that time frame. There was a clothing company what was that who came out with a commercial it was swing dance commercial they sold jeans well there was it was a store in all the malls that show that sold je I can’t think of the name of that store but they had a commercial on television where they had their people in the commercial were dancing in their jeans and they were playing an old Louis Prima song. It was a swing dance song.

27:27 So, that kind of fed off the swing dance craze back in that day.

27:31 Right—

27:32 After that, Dwight Yoakam redid crazy little thing called Love, which is the beat of that song is to a swing beat. It, you know, it’s a song that you can swing to. So he did his video at the time and he had people kind of doing what that commercial was doing except it they had his take on it. They were out there with the cowboy hats and stuff like that. So when the CMA awards came on, they wanted him to come on CMA awards and recreate his video on stage.

28:08 Gotcha. So that’s what we were there for is to is to basically kind of rejigger that routine to where it would can be on stage and it not only were we dancing on the stage behind us we were dancing on video. So they’re like if we were dancing to the right on the video screen behind us on stage we were dancing to the left. So the both routines, one on stage live, one behind us on the video screen, we were dancing kind of contra to one another.

28:38 I got you.

28:39 So visually was a cool effect.

28:41 I was just going to ask, what was that experience like?

28:44 Well, hard work. When you got there to the auditions, they basically took everybody in groups of 10 to 15 dancers a piece. Mo a lot of they were going to pick I think they picked like 12 girls, 12 guys. I think it was what they picked wind up coming with. And they would take you in big groups and they would the his choreographer would show you the routine. Then you had to go out into the hallway while they were showing the other groups the routine. And you know they only showed you the routine once or twice and you had to go back out in the hallway and learn the routine based off your memory.

29:20 Okay. All right. Well, that’s—

29:22 You didn’t get much chance. You know, you saw the routine once or twice and then you had to go out the hallway. You had to commit it to memory.

29:30 Yeah. You had to, you know, you know, you had to, you know, it was a principal dancing, you know, you had to know your stuff. A lot of the people out in the hallway, but try to remember what the routine that was, everybody was talking, what are we supposed to do here? What are we supposed to do there? And me, I might not have been the best answer there, but what did come in handy for me is I was an instructor and I could watch a routine and I could divide it up into sections very quickly and basically categorize those sections and learn them very quickly. So because I was an instructor, this is how I taught my students. I would divide stuff into section of this section, this section, this section, then would put it together. It was a very systematical way of learning routines that I was taught how to do as an instructor. The other people didn’t have that advantage even though they were technically better dancers than me.

30:28 Gotcha. You’re listening to Mark Nichols here on the Six-Figure Trucker brought to you by Norton Transport. Mark is sharing with us much of his fascinating life, some of his experiences from a backup dancer on for Dwight Yoakam to a ballroom dance instructor to a journalist and of course a driveaway truck driver. Mark we’ve enjoyed talking all these things with you. So much so that we want to visit with you next week again because if you were listening earlier, Mark made mention that he was a Gulf War veteran. We’re going to look down, we’re going to drill down on that next week, talk about his experiences overseas and also a little bit more about his experience as a driver. Mark, as we wrap up week one here, what else can you leave with us about life on the road as far as maybe a guide post, per se, if somebody’s considering this, considering driveaway? If you’re considering driveaway, one thing you have to learn, and it’s the first thing you have to learn before you do a load, sign up on a load.

31:35 Do your homework first. Know where you’re going. Know how you going to get out of the place you’re going to when you deliver and where you’re going to next. Make sure you know if there’s transportation out of that place you’re going to. So, you I tell every driver that I’ve ever worked with that, you know, is asking me advice. Number one thing before you sign up on a load, do your homework and you will find that you will save yourself a lot of headaches down the road. Gotcha. Great advice from Mark Nichols here on the Six-Figure Trucker brought to you by Norton Transport. Mark has a good baseline to give good advice on driveaway trucking. He’s been with us for 7 years. He’s not. He is an experienced driver behind the wheel there and he’s also, as you will hear next week, experienced overseas as a veteran. Mark, thank you very much for joining us. We look forward to hearing from you next week as well.

32:29 Thank you, John.

32:33 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 to professional, courteous, and 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.