There is a version of trucking that lives on YouTube. Somebody stands next to a box truck and explains how they made six figures in their first year, and the comments fill up with people saying they are about to quit their jobs and do the same thing. Some of them actually do it.
Victor Newton did it. Except Victor did not walk away from a job he hated. He walked away from 28 years as a barber, a career he built from the ground up, with a clientele that trusted him and a business that was real and stable. He just left it. Five and a half years later, he is still in trucking, running box trucks, having absorbed the bad driver hires and the repair bills and the new-authority seasons where brokers treat you like you do not exist. He figured out what the industry actually costs when you are not watching someone else do it on a screen.
On a recent episode of The Long Haul, host Adam Wingfield sat down with the man his more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers know as “Bigg Vic” to ask the question those videos never answer. Not whether trucking was worth it, but what it actually took, and what the people watching those videos do not understand about what is waiting for them on the other side of the decision.
The YouTube Headline That Started It All
Newton’s entry into trucking is, fittingly, a story that begins on YouTube. It was during COVID, the barbershop was closed, and YouTube had become his television. Then a headline stopped him cold: a box truck owner-operator claiming he made $20,000 in a month. “Wait a minute,” Newton remembered thinking. “Say what again? $20,000 with a truck.”
The hook that made it real was the part that makes box trucks the great on-ramp into this industry: it did not require a CDL. Newton had spent years in barber school and had no interest in going back to a classroom for a commercial license. A box truck under 26,000 pounds did not require one. Then a client sat down in his chair, a man who had quit his job to run Amazon Relay freight, and started showing Newton his invoices. “This is like taking candy from a baby,” the client told him. That was enough.
Newton procrastinated, then took a trip home to Connecticut and could not stop noticing the box trucks passing him on the highway. He told his wife he had to get one. Her response cut through the hesitation: stop talking about it and go get one. So he did. He spent $10,000 on his first box truck. It had 500,000 miles on it.
He took it without a diesel mechanic looking it over, on the seller’s word, with no maintenance records that were promised and never produced. It was a 2006 International with a Detroit engine, and he counted himself lucky only in hindsight that it was not a MaxxForce, because at the time he did not yet know enough to know the difference. He was, by his own description, winging all of it.
The First 90 Days That Fooled Him
Here is the part of Newton’s story that he is careful to flag as a warning rather than a template. His first weeks were extraordinary, and not in a way most new operators should expect.
He got approved for Amazon Relay the moment his insurance and authority went active. His first week brought in a couple thousand dollars. His second week, a few grand more. He had no idea at the time that these were not normal freight rates. “I’m thinking this is what trucking is all about,” he said. “I’ve been waiting this long to make this type of money weekly?”
Then his Amazon account got dinged when he booked a 53-foot load by mistake and his performance score dropped, pushing him onto the load boards he had never used, dispatching himself, learning on the fly. He decided to run over the road for a week, sleeping in the truck, no hotels, and documented the whole thing for his channel. He made $5,800 that week in a box truck. By his first 90 days he was already dreaming about a second, newer truck, doing the math in his head: if he could do this with one truck, imagine what he could do with two.
That early success was real, but Newton is the first to say it set a dangerous expectation, both for him and for the producers and music-industry contacts who watched his channel and started buying box trucks themselves. The market he started in was not the market that exists today, and the rates that made it look easy were a moment, not a baseline. As he put it now, plainly: “It’s trucking. It fluctuates. It goes up and down.”
The Line He Draws Between a Truck Owner and a Business Owner
The heart of the conversation, and the reason Newton’s content resonates, is a distinction he returns to constantly. There is a difference between owning a truck and owning a business, and most people who fail never understood which one they were doing.
Wingfield put the failure rate on the table directly: somewhere around 90% of new carriers wash out in the first couple of years. When he asked how much of that failure is actually a trucking problem versus a decision-making problem, Newton did not hesitate. “I think it’s about 70% the person. I don’t think it’s the trucking per se. It’s the person behind the business, because the average person comes into this business ill-prepared.”
His reasoning cuts to the core of why the box truck on-ramp is both a blessing and a trap. “Anybody can go buy a truck,” he said. “That’s what makes this business seem so simple. It doesn’t require me to have a commercial driver’s license if it’s under 26,000. But that’s the easy part. Now we have to run it after that.” The maintenance that comes due. The brokers. The shippers who leave you sitting at the dock for two and a half hours before they load you, if they load you at all. “Nobody told me I was going to have to sit at a shipper for 2.5 hours,” he said, describing the conversations he has with frustrated newcomers. “That’s trucking. It’s what’s going on between those areas.”
The driver mentality and the business mentality are different things, and Newton sees the gap clearly. The driver wants to drive and make money in his truck. The business owner wants to build a system, eventually remove himself from behind the wheel, hire drivers, put spreadsheets together, and create something that runs without him. “That requires a different type of person,” he said. “Not everybody is willing to go down that road. It’s too much for most people.”
The Barber Lessons That Carried Over
What separated Newton was not trucking knowledge, which he largely lacked at the start, but the entrepreneurial foundation he brought from nearly three decades of running his own chair and, eventually, his own shop.
Asked what business lessons from barbering helped him succeed in trucking, his first answer was money management. “We’re dealing with cash all the time as a barber,” he explained. He learned to manage and hold onto money when income came in daily and irregularly, the same discipline a freight business demands when revenue is lumpy and expenses are constant. Building credit, building business credit, understanding how to start and operate a business, all of it transferred. Starting a business was not hard for him, because he had already done it. What was hard was learning to drive a 26-foot truck, worrying about clearance heights, and discovering that the box on his first truck was too short, forcing him to break down pallets to fit freight that should have loaded cleanly. Nobody told him he needed at least 96 to 97 inches of clearance. He did not make that mistake on the second truck.
The Niche Strategy That Changes the Math
The most practically valuable stretch of the conversation came when Wingfield pushed Newton to get specific about how box truck operators actually escape the low-rate grind. Newton’s answer centered on two ideas the majority rarely cover: niches and partial loads.
Most box truck operators, Newton said, treat the load board as the whole business because it is cheap and simple. That is the training-wheels approach. The operators making real money are running niches almost nobody talks about. Pressed for his two favorites, he named event spaces, handling moves and breakdowns for companies relocating between locations and for specific events, and hotel chain moves. The hotel work is less steady, he noted, but securing one of those contracts can carry an operator through the slow periods that will inevitably come.
The partial-load insight was the one that visibly changed how he thinks. For his early loads he would put one broker’s freight on the truck and roll out, leaving the rest of the box empty. Then he met an operator running a 16-foot truck who partialed loads from California to the coast every week, making between $7,000 and $9,000. “Wait a minute, you said a 16-footer?” Newton recalled. It reframed his entire view of his own 26 feet of space. Now, when his trucks booked a load, he had the driver photograph the freight and tell him how many feet were left before leaving the area, so he could sell that remaining space. A $1,800 load plus another $1,200 to $1,300 going the same direction turned a couple thousand dollars into $3,500 with one more phone call. Mastered correctly, he said, partial loading is what takes a $50,000-a-year box truck to six figures.
He extended the point to direct freight and the misconception that holds people back. Most operators believe they need five or six trucks before they can land anything off the boards, anything dedicated or direct. Newton disagrees. He recounted hearing an operator at a MATS event describe walking into a direct shipper and asking one question: what is the freight you have the most problems moving? That single question, asked in the operator’s own backyard, parlayed into an $8 million annual contract. Most people, Newton noted, never ask it. They go straight to the load board.
The Psychology Underneath All of It
As the conversation deepened, Wingfield made an observation that landed: Newton teaches psychology more than trucking. Newton agreed immediately. “You hit it right on the head.”
His hardest truth is one he acknowledged people would not like. “The average person is a quitter,” he said. “We quit diets. We quit relationships. We quit jobs. So how easy would it be to go buy a truck, have it not work out the first three months, and just quit?” The people who make it, in his telling, come in with no exit. “Your plan B has to be your plan A.” He sees the lack of that commitment in the steady stream of people asking him about rental trucks, because they want to test the business rather than commit to it, and a half-commitment in an industry this demanding is its own kind of answer.
He talked about the herd, and why following it is fatal. “Only dead fish go with the flow,” he said. He talked about emotional control and the danger of booking freight from a place of panic, something he sees newer operators do daily out of desperation. The discipline he prizes most is the discipline to say no. “Discipline weighs ounces. Regret weighs tons.” For Newton that means turning down a load he knows he should not take, even when he needs to get out of an area, rather than effectively paying a broker to move their own freight. He would rather sit and wait for the right load. Most people, he said, do not have the mental capacity to say no and wait.
And patience, he argued, is not passive. Booking a couple of well-paying loads a week keeps an operator in the game far longer than booking a string of cheap ones. “You can book multiple cheap loads, but you’re still going to end up at zero after it’s all said and done.”
What Trucking Taught Him About People
In a rapid-fire close, Wingfield asked what trucking had taught Newton about people. His answer was the thesis of the entire episode. People will invest in equipment, he said, far more readily than they will invest in themselves. “They’ll spend the money. But when it comes to working on that psychology, and that thing in between your ears, which is the main part that will keep you in this game, most people don’t. They won’t work on themselves more than they work on their business.”
That belief sits underneath the one conviction Newton said he will defend against any pushback from his audience. With the right mindset, he insisted, a person can still start with one box truck, no CDL required, and change their family’s legacy and the entire direction of where they thought their life could go. He believes it because he lived it. He went from cutting hair and mixing records to building a small fleet in five and a half years.
But the version of that belief Newton preaches is not the version selling courses on YouTube. His is wrapped in a warning. The equipment is the easy part and the cheap part. The hard part, the part that determines whether the box truck becomes a business or becomes a truck someone is trying to sell after 90 bad days, is the work nobody can do for you and almost nobody wants to do at all. As Wingfield framed it in closing: entrepreneurship comes first, assets come second, and sometimes the metal investment needs to wait until the internal person is actually ready.
The post He Walked Away From 28 Years Behind the Barber Chair for a $10,000 Box Truck With 500,000 Miles. Five Years Later, Here Is What He Wishes Someone Had Told Him. appeared first on FreightWaves.
