As a psychology graduate of HBCU Clark Atlanta University, Jabbar Williams prides himself on being a serial entrepreneur. As he describes, he entered the “infamous rat race working in corporate America,” employed within the finance sector for 16 years as a branch manager but maintained other ventures outside of work. He constantly created additional income streams by establishing a t-shirt business, offering credit repair services, and entering real estate investing.
“In 2018, I got into the real estate industry and started fixing and flipping houses [and] did well, fixing and flipping houses, because that’s my real passion. Then the pandemic hit [and] real estate came to a standstill, building materials was sky high, nobody was getting evicted, nobody was moving. I needed to start another business because I always knew I wanted more,” he explains. The financial independence entrepreneurship afforded Williams motivated him to leave his nine-to-five occupation.
“I had reached the ceiling at my position, and then I ended up training my boss. So that was a slap in the face. Then, I entered into logistics in January of 2021. I’ve already heard over the years that you can make a lot of money in logistics,” he says. However, although the field is lucrative, Williams considered the maintenance, the breakdowns, and the overhead to run this particular enterprise. He met an associate who advised him he could enter the industry utilizing the rental route. After much consideration, an intrepid Williams acquired his first rental truck in January 2021. Three weeks later, he scaled up to a second box truck, eventually expanding to having eight trucks at one point, thereby initiating the success of his business.
Williams discovered renting box trucks instead of purchasing became a more viable business model. Obtaining a commercial vehicle requires creditworthiness, a substantial downpayment, and readily accessible income or upkeep of the truck while in transit. To bypass those financial potholes as an upcoming entrepreneur within the supply chain management, Williams went to an Ryder, opened a rental account, and commenced his business with only $3,200.
“So $200 for my LLC, $680 for my authority, that’s the MC/DOT and BOC3/UCR, that’s the numbers you see on the side of the truck,” he describes, the requirement he fulfilled to operate a business interstate and land contracts with prominent exporters.
“I paid $1375 for my insurance down payment and $1,000 for my rental deposit. I don’t pay for maintenance on any of the trucks, so if anything happens to the truck, it breaks down, they’ll swap me out in a sub-unit; I got good at it, [and] as I said, scaled up to eight trucks. I’m happy to have no overhead when it comes to that, and I never drove a box truck, by the way. I started this whole process while working a nine-to-five,” he happily indicates. To date, Williams’ business has grossed over two million dollars which has led him to teach thousands, whom he affectionately calls “boxheads,” how to have a thriving rental box truck company through his e-book, online courses, master classes, and mentorship.
“I have a first cousin; he’s a Secret Service agent working for 17 years in the D.C. area. He’s never [driven] a truck, and he has four trucks up and running,” he says. Williams boasts of the numerous positive reviews from his previous students who have three to four trucks, all of which sing his praises on his Instagram page because his direction has changed the trajectory of their lives.
“If you have a criminal record, coming home from jail, or, for example, I helped a lot of people in prison as well. [There’s] no background checks [to] what I’m doing,” he adds. Recently, he held a mentorship program with 90 students and offered a sold-out monthly masterclass with 40 registrants. Williams acknowledges he is such a stand-out in the industry due to how he steers interested parties towards rental trucks, which alleviates the arduous task of assembling a substantial down payment and assisting new business owners to advance their ventures.
“I use the same mindset like Turo, Airbnb – controlling something without the cost of ownership. When we were younger, it was told to own a house, stocks, bonds, something that matures over time, that’s great. But not owning something that’s a liability, that’s losing value. Especially if you’re starting out, I don’t recommend people buying a truck for the simple fact that you might not like it; everything is not for everybody. So if you try a rental ride and you don’t like it, you can get out of it because you’re renting a truck,” he reasons.
The contracts he has secured through his company Box Truck Shawty based in Atlanta, Georgia, have been primarily through Amazon Relay, “I only work with Amazon. I teach people how to get a contract, and basically, what we do is we pick up from a distribution center with a 26-foot box truck, and we either take that freight to another distribution center or we take it to a post office.”
The month of November is Amazon Relay’s peak season as holiday shopping ramps up, and Williams plans to expand to secure ten more rental trucks because Amazon’s delivery rates increase. Then, after the holidays, he will scale down to five trucks.
“In 2018, I went through a divorce I was married for 10 years, I literally lost everything. I was sleeping on my cousin’s couch, [experienced] losing my mom, and I was in a fatal car wreck when I was 19. I’m a positive person, I believe that you could look at the glass half empty or half full, and you can make excuses or complain or you can just go out and get it,” he says. “I feel like if I was able to bounce back and create a company that generated revenue over $2 million in two and a half years, I feel like anybody can do it. You just got to have the correct mindset to do it.”
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