"I want to honor my wife, and her being the 'woman behind the man behind the wheel,' which is a high calling. Our first date ... was the day I bought that 1997 W9, so she didn't know what she was getting into." --August Trucker of the Month Jason Shelly
Jason Shelly starts this week's Overdrive Radio episode with a tribute to Renita Shelly, who's been Shelly's "biggest fan," as she once told him, since the very start of his business. The truck he invokes in the quote up top is the very first one he purchased. He was then a company driver for Horseless Carriage Carriers in the 1990s and thinking he'd be able to lease on with the car hauler. The fact that he didn't, though, as he told in Part 1, set him off on a journey to a long-term customer and a business that has benefited from all manner of family support, including Renita's, through the years.
He's striven to pay it forward in all sorts of ways, and does so here with emphasis on family, key to many a truck owner-operator's success. His longtime owner-operator father, also pictured in the cover assemblage for the episode up top, is intimately involved in the accounting/bookkeeping and other aspects of Shelly's one-truck business, including recent work refurbishing the 2017 53-foot Great Dane reefer trailer also pictured.
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Going into the "second half of my career," he added, he's making a conscious effort to be more accommodating, too, remedy for all those times that "something or other happens at home and I'm 400 or 700 miles down the road and headed the wrong direction," which the "woman behind the man behind the wheel" bears on her own. Shelly referenced the old trucking song there -- we had a podcast episode put together by Max Heine about that one back several years ago here.
[Related: What's behind 'The Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel': OTR trucking and home realities]
For this week's episode, a tribute to Renita, but also plenty more in the way of Shelly's advice for the next generation of owner-operators trucking. Jason and Renita Shelly are certainly making it work for their family, and diversifying investments as time goes on that ought to set them up long-term financially. Not that Jason’s got a particular eye on retirement, which we’ll also hear more about in today’s episode. As he says, "I don't look to retire, exactly. I may slow down. But biblically, there's no verse that I've ever found in the Bible that says you retire at this age" or that age. Rather, "it says to finish strong." Take a listen:
[Related: 'Road Mode': The real cost of trucking done 'seriously' on home life, relationships]
Enter your business in Overdrive's Trucker of the Year competition for a chance to win a custom scale replica of your tractor as trophy but also a new seat and/or other perks from program sponsor Bostrom Seating.
