He Found His Way Out of the Streets in a Prison Cell With a Pamphlet. This Is How Debon “DJ” Sims Built a Trucking Business Nobody Could Take From Him.

The Line That Kept Him From Going Back

Ask Sims what kept him on the right road when the easier, more familiar one was right there, and he does not reach for something grand. He reaches for a memory from the people who raised him. If you touch the eye on the stove and it is hot, and you keep touching it, you are just going to keep getting burned. He took that all the way in.

“That’s what pushes me every day,” he said. “I don’t want to go back. I’m not going back.” Prison taught him what he valued, and it was not complicated: freedom, responsibility, the ability to take care of the people who depend on him. None of that exists behind a wall. So the choice, every day, was simple, even when it was hard. He had, in his own honest words, nothing else to turn back to, because he refused to turn back to what he already knew.

That refusal is the engine of the entire story. Everything else, the lease-purchase, the lost contract, the load board, the dedicated deal, was just Sims figuring out the how. The why never wavered.

The Lease-Purchase That Taught Him His Numbers

Sims did not have money for a truck, so like a lot of new drivers, he started in a lease-purchase program, first with Trans Am, later with Hirschbach. He is careful about how he talks about it, because he knows how many people go into a lease-purchase and never come out with anything. He came out with his numbers.

A good brother who had been driving while Sims was locked up trained him, taught him how to fuel, how to run his clock, how to operate as his own boss. And Sims, who says he has always been good with numbers, paid attention to every dollar. He knew the truck payment came out every week, 1,300 to 1,500 dollars, before fuel, before the maintenance account, before anything. He learned the brutal rhythm of it: the week does not run Friday to Sunday like most people want, it runs Thursday to Wednesday, and if you miss too many days you go negative, and once you are negative it is nearly impossible to climb back out.

Sims never went negative. Not once, across two lease-purchase programs. There were weeks his tank hit E and he was praying out loud just to make it to the next station, but he knew his numbers cold and he made it work. And while he ground through it, he was doing math on the biggest expense of all. If he could eliminate that 1,300-to-1,500-a-week truck payment by owning his own truck outright, the whole equation changed. In 2019 he bought his own truck. He calls it a step up, and it was, but he is honest that it came with more responsibility, no dispatcher, no direct lane, and a lesson he wishes he had learned slower: understand what maintenance actually costs before you jump, not after.

The Amazon Contract That Taught Him Not to Depend

Early on, Sims landed an Amazon contract, and for a lot of new carriers that feels like the finish line. Steady freight, a name-brand shipper, predictable volume. It arrived right around the pandemic, when everything shut down and freight had to move, and the money was unlike anything he had ever seen. He was clearing 65 to 7,200 dollars a week. He bought his truck in August running Amazon freight and was shopping for a second truck by December.

Then, for the exact same work, the rates fell. Nearly in half. And this is the moment the whole story turns on, because Sims did not chase it down. He knew his cost to operate his unit, a discipline he credits in part to host Adam Wingfield and the other mentors he leaned on, and because he knew that number, he understood something most operators learn too late: he could not move the truck just to be moving. “Don’t depend on them,” he says now, plainly, about building a business on someone else’s freight. “Don’t get fixated.”

When the Amazon rates stopped making sense, he jumped to the load board. And he hated it. The prices that were posted were not the prices you got when you called. Brokers, in his experience, played games, and some were flat disrespectful. He lost sleep. He describes the load-board stretch as everything a routine is not: you do not know what you are hauling, where you are going, or what it pays. But he kept running, because standing still was not an option, and he kept doing something else that mattered more.

The Application That Changed Everything

Sims kept inquiring. He kept asking questions. He had spreadsheets of companies to call in his area, and he called them, and a lot of them gave him the runaround, and he did not stop. “I couldn’t,” he said. He had built a mindset around the belief that he did not know everything and was never afraid to ask, because not asking would cost him, and every mentor he reached out to, Wingfield included, gave him the information for free. “This is my livelihood. I didn’t have time to play with it.”

Then, by what he calls the grace of God, something came across his phone through an app. A contract hauling waste. He recognized it instantly, because he had hauled that kind of freight once for a broker and knew it was not hard: they load the trailer, he takes it to the landfill, he dumps it. He contacted the company, landed the contract, and has been running it ever since. This was less than six months into his load-board stretch. He had been told no plenty of times before it, and it did not deter him, because, as he puts it, in this industry everything moves, and just because someone tells you no today does not mean the answer is no tomorrow. You keep inquiring. You stay consistent. You stay respectful.

That contract is with a waste company, Holland Waste, and Sims is quick to push back on anyone who would look down on hauling trash. It is a niche most dry-van operators will not even consider because they think it is beneath them, and their loss has been his stability. He had to learn things he did not know going in, how many tires the weight would eat through, what those loads actually do to equipment, and he is still learning, watching how others break equipment so he can avoid the same mistakes. But the freight is consistent, it is routine, and most of all, it gets him home every single day, unless they need him out of town, in which case they pay extra.

What the Contract Built

Three years in, the business has grown in a way Sims measures by stability, not by ego. After his first year he went to the company asking for a rate increase. They denied it flat. But then they turned around and did something better: they gave him a contract with no end date, and told him that when they need trucks, they come to him first, because they like how he operates. They also let him bring on operators under his own authority.

Today Sims owns three trucks, runs one himself, and has two more operating under his authority with other owner-operators. He has run as many as seven. The one location in Charlotte where he started has become access to multiple sites, Charlotte, Charleston, Savannah, and Virginia, with the company calling him first: DJ, can you come get this trash off the floor? The answer is either yes I’m coming or no I can’t make it this time, no love lost, and they call again the next week, because when he shows up, he does exactly what he is supposed to do.

He is deliberate about not growing faster than he can manage. He is not in a rush to put a driver in his own truck, because that is two headaches, the driver and the equipment. He watched mega-carriers with massive fleets go under because they could not manage what they built, and he decided a long time ago that the biggest fleet was never the goal. A business that survives the slow seasons and stays profitable is the goal. Whatever truck count delivers that is the right truck count.

The Answer for Anyone Who Thinks the Door Is Closed

Sims made it through incarceration, a lease-purchase, a lost contract, the load-board years, and COVID, and most people who go through that do not end up where he is. Asked for the honest reason he made it, he does not hesitate: knowing his numbers. Knowing what it costs to operate one unit is what let him take on two and three, what let him cover the repairs that are not a possibility but a certainty, what kept the bills paid while he grew. Without that, he says, he would have lost everything.

And to anyone out there with a record who has been told the trucking industry is closed to them, told no enough times that they have started to believe it, Sims has a direct message. He is a felon who got his CDL, and getting the license is not a no. Some companies will not hire you with a background, that is real, but with all the freight moving in this country, somebody is going to give you a chance. When you get it, take it as the opportunity it is and excel. Start your own if you have to. Get your own equipment, start on the load board, figure out what works, and know that it is genuinely possible to land a direct contract from there, because he did it. Stay respectful when you are told no. Keep it pushing. It is not pride, it is not personal, it is business, and there is plenty of freight out here.

He named the company Another Day Another Delivery Logistics on purpose. It started as another day, another dollar, but that did not feel professional enough to walk into a shipper’s office and say. Another day, another delivery is exactly what it is. Every day, you are trying to move something. Today is another day. Today is another delivery.

For DJ Sims, that is not a slogan on the side of a truck. It is a survival strategy that turned into something real. The trucking industry did not care where he started. It cared whether he showed up, stayed disciplined, kept learning, kept adapting, and treated the whole thing like a business instead of a way to stay moving. He figured that out the expensive way, in time and money and, before any of that, in freedom. And he is still here, every day, moving something.