How Rahmel Wattley Built The Truck N’ Hustle Community

Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast

In this episode of Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast, host Brent Hutto is joined by Rahmel Wattley, Founder of Truck N’ Hustle.
Join them as they:

• Explore Rahmel’s start in dispatching
• Discuss Rahmel’s first entrepreneurial venture: Ultimate Driver Staffing
• Shine a light on the impetus behind the FreighFest conference
• And more!

Rahmel Wattley is the founder of Truck N’ Hustle, the fastest growing network for transportation and logistics professionals. He connects and empowers professionals in the industry, providing them with insights, opportunities, and inspiration. In 2022, he launched the first FreightFest conference, attracting hundreds of attendees and speakers from across the sector.
Episode Highlights:
[01:58] Rahmel has been in transportation for around twenty years, entering the industry as a means to an end. He was unemployed, looking for a job that would pay him a good wage, and the marketing of the time was showing trucking as a career where you could easily make $50,000 a year. He found a place sponsoring people to get their commercial driver’s license (CDL) and saw it as a no-brainer: they were going to pay for him to make a large sum of money. While completing the class for the CDL, he realized he didn’t really want to be a truck driver but figured he would give it a go since he had the license. Very soon, he found an opportunity to instead become a dispatcher, managing drivers instead of driving himself. He was hired on the spot, and learned a lot about the industry from that role. It turned out that the man who hired him was committing fraud, so he was fired, leading Rahmel to end up taking over that position, becoming a 23 year old running a multimillion dollar account.
[11:11] After eleven years in the trucking game, Rahmel’s entrepreneurial bug started to kick in. While he was learning a lot, he was getting stressed out from dealing with a minimum of fifty drivers at any one time. He figured that, if he was getting so stressed, he might as well start his own thing. During busy periods, the company would reach out to driver lease companies, adding to their normal pool by drawing from another. Working behind the scenes and looking at the invoices, Rahmel realized the company was making a good profit on each driver they leased. He then started up his first driver staffing company: Ultimate Driver Staffing, earning $1.2 million in revenue in his first year.
[27:47] At Truck N’ Hustle, Rahmel is constantly building relationships with others in the trucking industry, it’s almost like a family. People always said to him that he should run an event, bringing all his guests together and creating a space for networking between them and his followers. Last year they started running events, the FreightFest conference, bringing the community together to network. They’ve run five so far, and have more planned, and the very first one was so successful that the fire marshal had to stop people entering the venue.
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