Mount Plymouth, Florida-based independent owner-operator Ruben Dotto doesn't hail from a big U.S. trucking lineage. Yet some of his earliest memories are of riding with his father when the elder worked as a truck driver in Argentina.
In 1982, after years of inflation the likes of which the U.S. has frankly never seen in our lifetimes, it got pretty common to see denominations on currency notes in the millions of pesos, and "my dad decided, 'I've had enough,'" as Ruben put it.
He flew Ruben (then 18 years old) and family to U.S. shores and the town of Orange, Connecticut, where Ruben's grandfather and an aunt had lived since the 1960s. His brother got a job as a baker's helper, working with bagels, a fast track to citizenship after "the owners took a liking to him," Ruben said. That's how most of his family became citizens, with employer sponsorship.
For Ruben, it took a few years to get to permanent resident status, he said, and once he did and was working regularly "the only thing I couldn’t do as a permanent resident was vote" or obtain a post in the military services. "I would’ve been in the service if I could have. They have really good benefits in the services."
Yet he wouldn't fully pursue citizenship until decades later, putting it off for one reason or another as life intervened; he found a groove, his natural fit, in truck ownership and operation as of the early part of this century.
- Today, as independent GIG Logistics, he pulls a 53-foot step deck behind a Bentz big bunk-outfitted 2009 Kenworth T660.
- Mechanical aptitude has served the owner-operator well. "I’m the type of guy who's not scared to take something apart," he said, figure out how it works and put it back together better.
- He's built a support system not only with a maintenance provider nearby for bigger jobs and close brokerage relationships, but also a direct shipper customer for whom he hauls live trees outbound from Florida to landscaping installations on the step deck.
- "I wish I knew 30 more guys like him," said one broker partner about the owner-operator, lauding an old-school, get-it-done approach.
Dotto and his wife, Michelle, lean into faith to sustain through hard times. "God gave me strength enough to be able to" learn and learn well through the years what makes his trucks tick, Ruben said of his DIY maintenance prowess, building over the more than two decades now in business for himself with authority.
Michelle, a CDL holder herself but no longer on the road with Ruben full-time, nominated him for Overdrive's 2026 Trucker of the Year award, noting some of these qualities with her nomination.
"He knows his truck," she said. "He drives safely," which a spotless record bears out for the operator, with upward of 2.5 million owner-operated miles behind him.
Ruben Dotto
Dotto's among a select few Caruthers will call directly about opportunities as they arise, offering load details and simply asking for a rate. Caruthers always has a ballpark in mind himself, and often enough Dotto "comes back with, say, '1,000, I'll do it for $1,000,' and I say, 'what about $1,200, I think it's worth that.'"
He's worth that kind of respect, Caruthers added, being one of "very few owners out there as capable. Half the time I don’t even have to send him a rate confirmation" before he's en route to pickup.
Owner-operator Ruben Dotto is Overdrive's June Trucker of the Month, marking GIG Logistics as a semi-finalist for the 2026 honor.
Owner-operator Dotto joins fellow Truckers of the Month in competition for Overdrive's 2026 Trucker of the Year award. Nominations are open for exceptional owners, whether leased or independent (up to three trucks). Enter your own or another owner-operator business you admire via this link.
[Related: Minding the Ps and Qs of costs, rates: Trucker of the Month Greg Labosky]
Hotshot nursery biz yields to Class 8 strapping, tarping
Ruben Dotto had four years of English instruction in high school before his family moved to the States, yet upon arrival in 1982, still, he "can't speak a lick of English," he said, describing those early years.
Yet as he would throughout his working life, he learned.
He moved to Florida 10 years later, and a few short years on he happened to meet the woman who would become his wife and longtime business partner, Michelle, driving as a courier on a flower delivery.
Michelle worked for an environmental engineering firm in rented office space in Orlando. On fateful day in 1995 she happened to be sitting on the front steps when "this guy pulls up in this really cool gold Thunderbird, delivering flowers to somebody." Kind of sarcastic, she said, "Oh, are those for me?"
Ruben stopped, looked at the flowers. "Is your name such and such?" as Michelle recalled. "And he just thought, 'Oh, maybe she needs me to bring her flowers.'"
He did, the next day, and their bond began.
The pair bought a house on four acres with several greenhouses and set to growing. Beautiful plants, sure, but the pair were not good marketers, not a known quantity in Florida's well-entrenched nursery world.
At once, the business all around them, easy to see the need for hauling. "They're always looking, asking for delivery people," said Michelle.
Ruben Dotto then bought his first power unit, a Ford F250 hotshot equipped to pull a 48-foot trailer, loaded with plants out of Florida bound for a North Carolina receiver who paid for the work.
Dotto modified the trailer to an extent to be able to carry more volume, and did the loading and unloading work on both ends, deadheading back every time. It didn't take him long to recognize he was leaving money on the table with all the empty miles.
In 2007, he bought his first Class 8 tractor, a 2001 Sterling with a condo sleeper pulling a refrigerated trailer to load back to Florida, then for produce runs to California and back, in addition to continuing nursery business.
The business grew from there. It was originally called Dotto Go, with carrier authority from the start. Business got tough quick with the Great Recession beginning the following year.
"The cost of tires and the truck payment and everything," Michelle said, "just overwhelmed us."
"It was really rough," Ruben said. "We lost our house at the time," but not the truck. "We still managed to keep the business going" through it all, always with an eye out for opportunity.
Reefer freight and load/unload dynamics at grocery warehouses and the like didn't suit his clear take-the-bull-by-the-horns instincts. "Even when you had a appointment," he said, "a lot of times you're still there three, four, or five hours" after the time came and went, little agency to do anything about it.
During the depths of the recession, in that toughest of tough years, 2009, Dotto left the reefer behind, bought a flatbed, and never looked back.
[Related: This could be the year: Recollections of Great Recession trucking side gigs, successes, failures]
Make it there, make it anywhere
Ruben Dotto's a school-of-hard-knocks student, fundamentally, diving straight in sight unseen with a flatbed in the middle of a huge economic downturn, with securement and so much else.
"From the start, it was a big learning process, because I never was in the [flatbed] business since we got our own authority from the beginning," he said. Most importantly, he knew to "ask a lot of questions" of his fellow owner-operators and seasoned drivers.
Michelle did much the same canvassing for freight on load boards and handling paperwork and taxes as the business solidified. "Learn as you go," she said.
The graduation finish line isn't 100% in sight today, but it's clear both Dottos are at the top of the class, always curious, always learning.
Even with an aging piece of equipment in the 2009 T660, sometimes oversize and otherwise aero-challenged step deck freight, and that heavy Bentz big bunk (a 152-incher), Ruben Dotto's maintained a near 7 MPG average for fuel mileage.
With his brother, Omar, occasionally with him for team runs, he moves a lot of heavy equipment from auction sites with Mark Caruthers, and has a close relationship with Urban Forestry Works and their tree farms in Florida and South Carolina.
That direct relationship started with a series brokered loads with origin points near Dotto's Florida home base.
"We had 39 loads that had to go to a residence up in Alabama," roughly five years ago, according to Urban Forestry Manager of Strategic Accounts Mark Grantham. "We hooked up with" GIG Logistics through a brokerage for more than one, and Grantham clearly recognized Dotto's aptitude for the specialized nature of the freight, something he had zero experience with before.
"Our trees are very large," said Grantham, requiring a one-piece landscape tree tarp -- big 40-foot oak trees and magnolias, sometimes smaller ones. Too often, other operators might show up with 12-by-16 tarps that just don't cut it, despite clear instructions delivered by a broker, say.
Grantham never misses an opportunity to keep things direct, he said.
As Dotto tells it, after those loads were a part of history, "They approached me, and they said, 'well, since you're here from the area, could we call you directly?'"
Grantham and company would actually purchase Dotto's previous tractor and one of his step decks, pictured here when still under GIG's ownership. The load there was quite a memorable one for Ruben and Michelle, then teaming -- a big tranmission part for the pictured ship in a Gulf Coast dry dock.
The Volvo above is now one of two trucks Urban Forestry owns, and were it not for that truck they might utilize GIG Logistics more than they do today, Grantham said. "He’s great -- we love Ruben, and have a great relationship with him. I couldn’t recommend him any more."
[Related: Top of the trucking: Trucker of the Year John Penn, interviewed from the MATS show floor]
Integrating biz, family, community and faith OTR
Year 2018 was a pivotal one for Ruben Dotto. Success at that point in flatbed had been such that the company grew to a couple trucks at one point. Yet the stress of having employees was too much. He backed away, and not only turned to the step deck but also the Volvo pictured above.
Michelle joined him for a few years on the truck as a driver herself, and adventures ensued. The pair can rattle off scads of memories of loads various and sundry, including the dry-dock delivery pictured above.
There's the time they managed to finagle a parking spot to see Mt. Rushmore mid-delivery in the Dakotas in a helicopter. Long before that, Ruben's first flatbed load -- big heavy bags of trash compacted in New England and landfill-bound in Ohio that captivated Ruben's imagination for what it meant for the Ohio buyers.
"They buy all their trash and then they bury it in the landfill and make methane gas out of it and sell it," he said.
Most anything can come with a value attached.
More recently, trees to Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia for Urban Forestry after it took a big hit from Hurricane Helene in 2024.
Big digital sign picked up in Dallas and bound for the top of an office building in Manhattan, craned off the truck to lift it up to put it on the building 20-plus floors above, Michelle said. "And then as we're leaving New York, we get hit by a city bus. Thank you very much. I don't want to go to New York anymore."
Ruben's always been a man of the road since those early courier days, Michelle noted (he also drove a cab to and from Disney World back then). Yet she wasn't made for traffic navigation -- her favorite moment OTR was early COVID, with the serenity of near-empty highways.
During those quite interesting years, she finally was able to convince Dotto to move on something he'd put off out of simple convenience for decades. "I became a citizen in 2020," he said. No more trips every 10 years to Miami to "renew my permanent residency," and opportunity to vote of course.
Today, Michelle's out of the driver's seat and only rolls as a passenger with loads that take them to visit family or a vacation spot, now with plenty of room for five pets to join. Otherwise, she handles the biz books and helps secure freight. Like Ruben with maintenance, she's learned a lot on her own working with Quickbooks, state permitting offices and tax law, as they've managed through years.
GIG Logistics operates as an LLC filing as S Corp, the Dottos paying themselves as employees of the business, saving on self-employment taxes to reinvest in the biz and their community.
[Related: How, and when it makes sense for owner-operator LLCs, to file as an S Corp]
They do employ a driver, time to time, since the 2024 purchase of the KW T660 big bunk, but he's family: as noted above Ruben's brother, Omar.
Ruben keeps the iron sharp, learning something new daily. Speaking to Overdrive earlier this month he was prepping to take out the AC compressor, replace and recharge it -- and "the high-pressure sensor was bad," he noted. He'd also be replacing it.
Owner-operator Dotto will do his own brakes, oil changes, starter, radiator, with the Volvo previously the constantly failing DEF-system sensors. "I don’t feel capable enough to do an overhaul or take a transmission apart," he said, relying on a nearby mechanic he's trusted for many years for those jobs.
But he'll do pretty much anything else. "He scares me some of the stuff he does," Michelle said. He's not shy about getting the hands dirty, literally and figuratively. Or stung, as the case may be.
Owner-operator Dotto here is pictured after a day spent up under the KW and step deck with a pressure washer.
Conditions are good, generally speaking, for Dottos. "We make more money when the fuel is high" than low, Ruben noted, working with the partners they do.
They utilize the OTR Solutions factoring service for credit checks of unfamiliar brokers, both Truckstop.com and DAT, alternately, for spot opportunities.
If a broker's not factorable through OTR, Dotto's learned to insist on payment at pickup, not COD, after being burned one too many times years prior.
He's home often enough these days himself, and counts it a blessing that "even when I first started," he said, "I wasn’t ever out more than a couple weeks at a time" as the Dottos' three daughters and a son were growing up, all adults today.
Home time's made it possible for the Dottos to be instrumental in recent years in the founding of a new church that's nearing completion of its sanctuary.
It more or less started in their living room after their prior church and its pastor split.
They're counting the blessings, all part of the reason for the name change of the biz to what it is today. The GIG in their company name stands for something, after all. "God Is Good," said Michelle.
A tile floor was going in at the new East Lake Community Church, a non-denominational congregation, as they spoke earlier this month.
[Related: Spec the truck to the job: Owner-op Ron Schreiner's turn to oilfield work]
Enter your business or nominate an exceptional owner-op you admire to contend for the 2026 Trucker of the Year award via the form on this page. Nominations made there. Hear all 2026 contenders' stories so far in their own words via the Overdrive Radio playlist below.
