My Business:

Have you ever seen those big oversized trucks come down the highway?  The ones with the big “Oversize” or “Wide Load” signs on the front and back of the truck?  Well, those trucks need permits from each state that they go through.  Permits that tell them what roads they can travel on and when they can drive down them.  What I do is get those permits from each of the states (and sometimes the cities or counties they go through) for the truckers.

All of the work is done over the internet, the phone and fax.  Which is why this is a perfect home based business.  Customers don’t come to the office, I don’t have to travel anywhere to get the permits, and there is no inventory to store.  The downside is that some of the permits are extremely expensive and some of them have to be paid for at time of purchase.  By expensive I mean upwards around $800.  We charge extra for permits that are over a certain amount though, so it is worth it.

My Beginning:

I started working for a company back in 2002 as a dispatcher for Pilot Cars.  A pilot car is a vehicle that follows some oversized loads to make sure they are safe while traveling.  This was my first introduction to this side of the trucking industry.  Coming from a family of truckers, I fit perfectly for this line of work.  My grandfather was a trucker and owned a small trucking company.  When I was very small my mom took over that trucking company and turned it into a medium sized successful company.  Needless to say, trucking was in my blood.

After working in dispatch for about a year, I started training as a permit agent in that company.  Then a year later, a much better (although smaller) company wooed me away.  This new company was more relaxed and had a “family” feel to it.  I was very happy there and did really well.  I worked there for about 3 years when Steve, my boyfriend, decided he wanted to move to Las Vegas to live cheaper and get a good job in he IT sector out there.

Working From Home:

I knew that I was going to move to Vegas with my boyfriend, no matter what happened, but I was hoping to talk my boss into letting me continue doing my job at home.  I knew he had done this with other people within the company, and felt that he would be willing to work with me on this.  Luckily, he felt that I was a valuable employee and didn’t want to lose me and we negotiated some details about pay and such.  In the end he agreed to allow me to work at home in Las Vegas.

Starting My Own Company:

Unfortunately, some other people from my first company also were hired at the new company.  They were not ideal employees.  They were mostly lazy and didn’t want to work as hard as others.  Sometimes this is a contagious attitude, and it spread amongst a lot of the other employees.  I started getting more and more frustrated because I had to rely on the people in the home office to do certain things, and they weren’t willing to do them.

My customers weren’t being treated with respect or courtesy, and neither was I.  part of the original negotiation for allowing me to work from home was a lower pay rate for a certain amount of time, and then it would gradually go up to my previous wage.  This didn’t happen as we had agreed upon and I was starting to have problems financially.  I was getting increasingly frustrated and unhappy with the way things were going with the company.  Add to that I was also having medical problems with my back and ended up having surgery on it in Jan of 2008.  Which of course my time off work just exagerated all the problems I was having with work.

My boyfriend had been trying to talk me into starting our own company not long after we moved to Las Vegas.  I was extremely reluctant at first because of how expensive the permits are and how stressful the business can be at times.  The winter can get very slow because of snow and closures very little is moving around the country.  then in the summer it’s the exact opposite, where you can be so busy you can’t get everything done in one day and of course it all needs to be done yesterday.  But with all the problems I was having with my co-workers and my boss not paying me what he had promised, it wasn’t long before I was agreeing to it.

Finally in July of 2008 we had all of our ducks in a row, some money saved up, and we opened our business.  We’ve grown exponentially since then.  We’ve been going strong for almost two years now.  It’s been rough at times, but we’ve made it through each of those rough patches and not only come out ahead but come out champions!  Partially thanks to our wonderful friend and SEO guru at SEOME.  He’s made sure that we are on top of the organic search results on almost all of our search terms (we beat my old boss at that on everything!  HA!).  I never thought that SEO would make such a huge difference in this industry but it has been proven that our website is a HUGE draw for at least 80% of the customers we get.

Although we’re still struggling and new, we’re growing more and more all the time.  I”m thrilled with my business and where it’s going.  We’re even training my mom to do some permits right now, because we’re going to need her this summer when things get really busy.  We may even be able to start training my oldest son as well!  This summer will definitely be an exciting one for us becuase of the growth we’ve had over the winter.  So we’re going to need their help for sure.