Those pages are mostly as I wrote them starting in 2003, with only a few dead links removed. They reflect how I drove at that time, not the way I am driving today.
I know of no one who didn't have a life prior to starting in driveaway. Here are some of the things I have done in my prior life. I grew up on a dairy/crop farm and drove many kinds of equimpment, our family also owned two right hand driver mail cars so I also learned driving in those. As an adult I had 12 years as a shipping manager, 3 years as a trucking operations manager and 6 years as a computer tech. In addition I had a second, part-time job for about 12 years driving a delivery route. Shorter jobs included truckdriver, fry-cook and factory work.
I was working a temp factory job when I saw the driveaway ad in the local paper. I am almost sure I had seem the same ad with a lower 'expected income' in prior ads. But this time I applied and was contracted on.
After about three months, I didn't seem to be making any money. At that point I looked at the details of each trip and realized that some of the runs I was taking weren't making me any money. That is where I learned to say 'No.' Sometimes I had to sit and wait for a better run, but when I was running I was making money.
Sometime within my first year of driving, I went back and started doing computer work when I was not driving. This allowed me to be pickier on my runs, knowing I had fill in work when I was in town.
When things crashed in 2007-08, I was able to fill in with non-driving work and only drove eigth days that year.
Other than that time frame, I have worked full time doing driveway with the biggest push being when my wife was layed off and we also had to pay the medical insurance out of pocket.
I also tried dispatching for a few months but the stress didn't agree with me so as soon as I had a replacement trained I was back on the road. I also did 'local only' / no overnights for one year.
The longer version can be found here.
The short version is this is my wife started traveling with me and then driving with me.
We have been doing driveaway together since the the winter of 2014. Up to that point I had only worked for one company. Once my wife started traveling with me, we hired on at a 2nd company and then a third. Before too long we ended up dropping Co #2 and now have been just driving OTR for Co #3. I do still drive for Co #1 when I need local work for short periods of time.