Today we’d like to introduce you to Arilyn Ruffell.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
It was a dream of my husband’s, to own a CDL school. We started training and testing students in April of 2015 with one truck and just the two of us. We’ve always been fair and honest with our students and so now we have 5 trucks, 7 employees. There have been some struggles and so my husband is getting out of the business and so now I own the business myself. He is going on to other things. It’s kind of crazy that I am now running a CDL school by myself. I never thought this is what I’d be doing when I was going to school.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Oh heavens no, it’s been a struggle. We’ve had many hurdles that we had to jump over., internally and externally Our biggest struggle is with the State of Utah, more particularly the supervisor that ran the third-party testing program. He seems to be one that glorified himself in power. This caused a lot of issues for all third-party testers, but for some reason, he seemed really out to get us. He has cost us a lot of time and money. It’s a story of its own, what he has put us through.
Hiring and keeping good employees has also been a challenge. It’s a scary job to take new students on the road in such big trucks.
Scheduling has also been a struggle. We have full-time, part-time, hourly, and tests to schedule in the trucks. Sometimes students don’t show up and sometimes students not on the schedule show up. So scheduling is an everyday struggle.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We offer training and testing for those interested in getting their commercial driver’s license. We have helped a lot of refugees and people down on their luck, start a new career, and be able to support their families. It really feels good knowing that we are helping others so much. We treat all of our students with respect, honesty, and fairness. This has given us a good reputation and we get people from all around the country coming to our school.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
All throughout covid, we have kept our doors open, to make sure we did our part to help supply the demand for truckers to get us our toilet paper.
Pricing:
- 5000 for our Full Course
- 3600 for our Fast Track
- 150 hourly
- 300 first test
- 250 subsequent tests
Contact Info:
- Email: utapextrucking@gmail.com
- Website: iWantMyCDL.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=apex%20trucking%20llc
