Transportation, logistics entrepreneur behind the wheel of 2 companies

Getting a commercial driver’s license, or CDL, is the “golden ticket” for some families in Florida, according to Tra Williams, owner of truck driver training company FleetForce. 

Bradenton-based FleetForce is on track to train nearly 3,000 drivers this year through a month-long course on college campuses statewide. It is a program that can “change the trajectory of a family,” Williams says.

“There isn’t another trade in America where you can go from minimum wage to $80,000 a year in four weeks,” Williams adds. “It does not exist. It is CDL. That is it.”

Williams, 50, sees his company as filling a need at both the national and local level, and the company plans to grow beyond Florida in the next year.

Over the next decade, the trucking industry will need to hire roughly 1.2 million new drivers to keep pace with retirements and growing demand, according to the American Trucking Associations. Those drivers are needed to do everything from hauling cargo to transporting people.

“The commercial driver’s license makes you a professional driver,” Williams says. “People use the term trucker loosely but make no mistake about it, these guys are experts in their field. You’ve got to move a $2 million excavator that’s three lanes wide? You call a CDL driver…. Everything from the trash being picked up beside your roads to the school bus that picks up your kids and takes them to school is driven by a CDL driver.”

Williams — he does not have a CDL himself — views his role as something of a connector. In 2020, he bought what he described as a sleepy truck driving school in Winter Haven with seven to 10 students a month. 

“I saw the saliency and the need and the pent-up demand for drivers,” Williams says. He also knew federal legislation was taking effect in 2022 that would require training programs of CDL drivers.

Drawing on experience he gained from working in franchises earlier in his life, Williams grew the business. FleetForce is now at 10 college campuses around the state. It is “not a school,” Williams says. It provides a service on campuses, where the schools certify the drivers.

In Florida, there is a need for 15,000 to 16,000 CDL drivers alone. In Texas — where FleetForce will be launching in 2025 — there are about 72,000 CDL jobs that need to be filled, he says.

The plan is to grow FleetForce to a "half dozen or so" states, according to Williams.

“There’s such a demand for what we do, we could go to 10 states in six months if we wanted to. But we really think of this as a marathon and not a sprint,” Williams says. “So we’re being really methodical about where we go and who we work with. I like to move fast as an entrepreneur, but I don’t want to get out over my skis.”

Williams has had the drive to forge his own path his entire life. Growing up in an area where there were “no readily available jobs,” he says he learned to create his own. He hails from Blackshear, Georgia, a town of a little over 3,500 people about 80 miles northwest of Jacksonville. His family had a roadside stand selling vegetables and painted ceramics when he was a child. As a teenager, he mowed grass and painted fences to earn money.

In his early 20s, he started a business as a personal trainer in Nashville., where he offered his services to hotels off Music Row. Among his clients were record executives staying in hotels.

“I had more clients than I did hours in the day and figured out that I could farm those to other personal trainers,” Williams recalls. “The hotel would pay me, I’d keep my cut and pay [the trainers]. That was like my very first job.”

He had always been passionate about health and fitness. In fact, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in pre-medicine from the University of Georgia. At the time, he thought he would go into managing hospitals, to have the greatest impact on the largest number of people. However, “after completing undergraduate school … I was so incredibly burned out that I lost my momentum,” Williams says. 

In 2021, Sunbury Press published his book "Boss Brain: Unlock Your Entrepreneurial Instincts" to help people get out of their own way and start their own businesses as he had done. 

“I don’t know if I’m a thriving entrepreneur because I’m a terrible employee or vice versa,” Williams says. “But from a very very young age, I wanted to carve my own path.”

During his career, he's also worked in commercial real estate, which he says gave him knowledge that led to his latest venture: an app called ParkPro. It aims to put empty parking lots to good use.

According to Williams, there is an overage of places to park across the country but legions of truck drivers with nowhere to park their vehicles during the 10 hours a day they are federally mandated to be off the road.

“We are not short on space. What we are short on is connectivity between those who have space and those who need space,” says Williams. His plan is for places like convention centers that do not need parking lots overnight to be able to connect with truck drivers looking for someplace to rest through an app that works like Uber or Airbnb, he says. The ParkPro app is currently in pilot mode. 

“In a lot of ways, the ParkPro and FleetForce model are very similar, where we are trying to connect those who need a product or service with those who have a product or service, and we like that because it requires agility, it requires the willingness to be disruptive in the industry and it requires that you be a little fearless because it’s a two-way marketplace,” says Williams.

In both ventures, “I just kind of fell into it,” Williams says. “But you know that’s been true for just about every company that I’ve founded or entered or been part of. In retrospect, it was never really part of my plan, but I think that part of the definition of being an entrepreneur is being open to opportunities when they present themselves and not feeling the rigidity that comes with sticking to some clearly quantified plan.”