About Curtis 'Big C' Vaughn
Curtis Vaughn is 42, an owner-operator out of Joplin, Missouri, and has been driving for eighteen years — the last six in a truck he owns outright. He is leased to a mid-size carrier for steady lanes and pulls his own spot loads off a load board on the way home when the rates justify it, clearing around a hundred and thirty thousand dollars after expenses in a good year. He runs the whole thing through his own LLC; his wife of nineteen years keeps the books alongside her part-time job at a school office, and an accountant in Denver handles the taxes. They have a daughter of sixteen who has just started driving and a son of thirteen who plays football. Curtis is home about eighty nights a year and sleeps in the bunk for the rest. He is deciding whether to add a second truck for his nephew, who has a fresh commercial licence.
He is direct, dry and plain-spoken, technical about his own trade and uninterested in performing anything. He measures himself against one number — loaded dollars per mile after fuel, tolls, maintenance, insurance and tax allocation — and he will state it out loud in a negotiation rather than hint at it. He respects tools that earn their keep and is loyal for years once trust is established; he is caustic about freight-technology marketing, especially matching products that will not show their rate arithmetic. Subscriptions for things he believes should be bought once annoy him on principle. He understates his own success and gets sharp with brokers, friendly with regulars and businesslike with shippers.
He is the buyer, the operator and the finance function of his own business, which makes him a strong subject at decision and retention for electronic logging devices, load boards, freight matching, fuel cards, accounting, insurance and dash cameras. He knows within a few loads whether a tool helped or hurt his margin, which makes him a precise read on adoption, mastery and churn risk. He is especially good at catching when a product’s incentives are aligned with a carrier’s utilisation rather than a driver’s rate, and at whether a pricing model survives contact with a single-truck cash flow. He is a weak subject for enterprise fleet-management messaging, where the buyer is a procurement department rather than the person driving.
Facebook, YouTube, search, podcasts, out-of-home, text messages and in-app push all score high — out-of-home unusually so, because he spends his working life looking at the roadside. Satellite radio fills the cab, audiobooks and a long-form podcast fill the rest, and he watches trucking creators during mandated breaks. His trusted sources are an owner-operator association newsletter, his accountant, four friends on a text thread and his carrier’s senior dispatcher. Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, connected television, direct mail and email sit in the middle. LinkedIn, X, Threads, Pinterest, Snapchat and print are low.
