Active Lifestyle

Driver turns misfortune into a fortune

When truck driver Roy Stinson (photo) suffered a serious back injury that knocked him off the road and out of a job for two years, his life unraveled and started to sound like one of those really bad, sad Country-Western songs. Unable to pay his bills, he lost his cars, his house and eventually his marriage.
     The only thing he didn’t lose was weight. Stinson, once a wiry 150-pounder, packed on nearly 100 extra pounds during his 10 years in a big rig. With nowhere to turn, the ailing, overweight, unemployed trucker from Oklahoma ended up moving back into his mother’s house.
     Of course, bad, sad CW records have a flip side, and so does Stinson’s story. Down but not out, Stinson, a self-described “computer geek,” enrolled in tech school, determined to learn everything he could about computers. Meanwhile, after surgery, two years of therapy and shear willpower, he overcame his back injury and returned to the truck cab, determined to find a way to combine the two things he knew and loved best: trucking and technology.
     That’s when an idea that would change Stinson’s fortunes once again, this time for the better, popped into his head. “When you’re a truck driver, you have a lot of time to think,” Stinson says. “That cab is a real think box. I was looking at my mirror brackets and I thought, if it can hold a mirror steady while going down the road at 60 mph, maybe I can figure out a way to use those same brackets to mount a tray to my air-ride seat that could hold my laptop computer.”
     Stinson built the prototype for what would become a “Trucker’s Workstation” in a truck stop parking lot. When other drivers saw what he had and asked where they could get one, Stinson knew he was on to something. In 2005, he quit his driving job, cashed in his 401(k) and launched his own company.
     Today, Tulsa, OK-based CyberTrucker, LLC (http://cybertrucker.com) is a successful manufacturing and marketing company boasting a line of popular products sold at hundreds of truck stops across the country. Aided by a team of truck drivers who serve as CyberTrucker sales and marketing reps (who better to call on a truck-stop client than a truck driver?), Stinson runs the whole operation on, what else, a laptop computer.
     What driver needs a laptop computer up and running at his or her fingertips in the cab? All of them. According to Stinson, it’s not only a professional issue (directions, instant bookkeeping, real-time access to high-paying LDL freight, e-mail communications, etc.), it’s a lifestyle issue. The average driver spends 30 hours a week sitting in the truck, waiting to get loaded or unloaded. A laptop and Internet access brings a world of information and entertainment into the cab to fill those otherwise empty hours. Judging from the fast-growing sales at CyberTrucker, plenty of drivers agree.
     Meanwhile, Stinson is shedding those extra pounds, 20 of them since March thanks in part to a Dynamax Core Trainer, another product CyberTrucker markets. And thanks to his company’s success, Stinson now has several new cars, a new house, a new wife and a new life.