Celebrating Black Voices in Trucking | Rahmel Wattley

“It’s Cool and It’s Needed”

Rahmel Wattley’s journey to Truck ’N Hustle

Rahmel Wattley needed a job. It was 2002, and he wasn’t yet the successful entrepreneur or celebrity podcaster he is today — Truck N’ Hustle wasn’t even a twinkle in his eye.

Newspaper ads promised money to be made by being a truck driver. So he got his CDL, but things didn’t quite go as planned. “I very, very quickly realized that driving the truck wasn’t for me,” Wattley says. “I just wasn’t comfortable behind the wheel. I always tell people, driving a truck is either for you, or it is not for you. You either have it, or you don’t have it.”

Lucky for him, the owner of a small trucking company suggested he try dispatching. It was there Wattley realized he really liked the industry. “A lot of the people I worked with were people who started off driving the trucks, and they would just move their way into management, whether they’re dispatching or operation manager or fleet manager,” he says. “There’s no other industry like this, where you could just come in at an entry level and make really good money.”

Wattley climbed the corporate ladder, eventually working in operations for Ryder, where he learned about lease drivers who fulfill seasonal needs for carriers. 

“I started to get really cool with these drivers, because I’d be dispatching them, and I would also get really cool with the owners,” he says. “I asked a lot of questions. I wanted to know the secret sauce. I’m like, ‘How much does it cost to start this kind of company, and what’s your overhead?’ Long story long, I started my own company doing the same thing.”

In 2015, he started a truck driver staffing company that reached $1.2 million in sales in its first year. He sold that company in 2019 and found himself with a little time before starting his current staffing company, Mega Driver Solutions, Inc.

Once a young rapper, Wattley decided to use his music and his voice to create a podcast about trucking. Truck N’ Hustle was born in 2019.

“I’ve been in the trucking industry for 20 years and I was like, man, if I’m going to start a podcast, I should start a podcast in trucking,” Wattley says. “That’s where my knowledge base is. … Then I started thinking about the kind of gaps in knowledge and information there was in the transportation community. I have a lot of friends who are drivers, a lot of friends who are working in warehouses, pickers and packers, who would love to take it to the next level and learn more about transportation and the supply chain and how things work. Because there’s no real access to information, they kind of just get stuck there in those positions.”

Wattley provides that access, and he does so in a fun, cool way. Now he sees Truck N’ Hustle as much more than just a medium: “Truck N’ Hustle is a community. Truck N’ Hustle is a movement. Truck N’ Hustle is a podcast. Truck N’ Hustle is a platform. It’s a safe space for entrepreneurs in the trucking industry and people who want to get into the trucking industry to learn, to get information, and to become inspired.”

It also joined the ranks of some of the trucking industry’s favorite podcasts, with audience members tuning in regularly for Wattley-hosted episodes. 

“I wanted to really root ourselves in the community, specifically minorities, but then start to make it more inclusive to where we start bringing everybody together, and we start bridging those gaps,” Wattley says. “For a long time, the trucking industry has been very segmented, and different cultures don’t relate to each other. … Now it’s time to bring everybody on a platform where we all can feel comfortable. We all can have those tough conversations and, hopefully, start to bridge some of those gaps and fill in some of those spaces that we have in the industry. To work together more as a people, just unifying things. At the end of the day, we all need each other.”

Disclaimer: All views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Transfix, Inc. or any parent companies or affiliates or the companies with which the participants are affiliated, and may have been previously disseminated by them. The views and opinions expressed herein are based upon information considered reliable, but neither Transfix, Inc. nor its affiliates, nor the companies with which such participants are affiliated, warrant its completeness or accuracy, and it should not be relied upon as such. All such views and opinions are subject to change.