Actor Donal Logue discusses how personal experiences and Hollywood lessons shaped his venture into the trucking industry.
What inspired you to start Aisling Truck Academy, and how did your personal experiences contribute to this decision?
I like taking risks in life and starting new ventures. Since I was born, my family moved so much that change became part of my DNA. My curiosity around trucking started after we moved to the desert near the Mexican border ‘70s, talking on CBs and watching “B. J. and the Bear” and Jerry Reed in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies. The ‘70s was a time when trucking and truckers were cool in the cultural zeitgeist. After I turned 16, I drove a box truck delivering goods between El Centro and Los Angeles, and I fell in love with the road because of those runs I did with my cousin.
In 2010, a show called “Terriers” that I was working on was canceled, and I felt like I wanted a change. I’d been curious about a trucking school near the town I lived in in Oregon, and I impetuously called the number listed on the back of a trailer. Like I’d hoped it would, truck driving school changed me, but I hadn’t expected just how much it would.
The decision to transition from a new CDL holder to an owner in Aisling Trucking and Aisling Truck Academy was 100% because I met two people I really wanted in my life and who I believed in. When I received my CDL, I became incredibly close to my instructors, Bud and Cathy Williams. I was impressed with how much care and individualized attention they gave each student. Bud and Cathy impressed upon us the importance of trucking and how serious and difficult a profession it could be. I’d always been curious about trucking, but I came to love it. I’ve been blessed with some incredible teachers in my life, but Bud and Cathy were next level. They were passionate and engaged. They emphasized they were training people for careers in trucking, not just getting a Commercial Driver’s License. After I got my CDL, knowing I had another career as an actor, Cathy shook her finger at me and said, “Don’t leave trucking behind.”
A few weeks later, a neighbor told me that a woman he knew was selling her late husband’s ’95 Peterbilt. My wheels started turning. I called Bud and Cathy who took the truck for a test drive. They immediately fell in love. Black with chrome stacks, we purchased the truck that we named Sadbh after my stepdaughter. Knowing Bud and Cathy wanted to go into business for themselves, we started Aisling Trucking with one truck with a million miles on her, a couple of Dodge Ram pickups with Cummins engines for hotshot loads, and it grew from there. Now, Aisling Trucking and Truck Academy has three campuses in White City, Goshen, and Klamath Falls, Oregon.
As a business owner, what has been the most rewarding aspect of running Aisling Truck Academy, and how have you seen it positively impact the lives of aspiring truck drivers and the broader trucking community?
I always think back to a comment Bud made regarding his motivation to start a trucking company. He said, “Wouldn’t it be great someday to have a Fourth of July BBQ for all the employees and their families, and look around and see all the people our endeavor has created livelihoods for?” I loved the sentiment. It really spoke to who Bud and Cathy are as people. Our motivation was to build a platform that would help others.
Unfortunately, a family situation required Bud and Cathy to come off the road driving loads as a tandem team. We had to pivot. It turned out that the transition to include a truck driving academy on top of our trucking company became a perfect, symbiotic, addition.
There’s an element to trade schools that exist on a purely spiritual level. It goes back to the “give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish” maxim. Over their decades of teaching, Bud and Cathy taught hundreds of students from varying backgrounds a new trade — be they veterans, people who might have never held a steady gig, or people on public assistance looking to do something with their lives they could be proud of. I can’t tell you how many former students bobtail into our Academy parking lot beaming with pride to show off their new trucks and check in with Bud and Cathy to talk about how their families are doing. I think that’s the most rewarding part — Aisling Truck Academy is a portal to changing people’s lives.
America needs truckers. We need truckers who are properly trained and not just thrown onto the road feeling insecure and undertrained. While I was a critical component in the early days of the trucking company and the creation of the school, it’s been all Bud and Cathy (and later, Josh Ponder). I just want to be clear and give an accurate portrayal of the situation.
Can you share some of the unique programs or methods that set your academy apart from others in the trucking industry?
First and foremost is the curriculum Bud and Cathy have developed and perfected — methods I got to experience when I was their student and that have become even more precise and refined since. Every hour of the four weeks of class is planned and plotted, including classroom work on logbooks, working on a shifting range, yard work, backing, coupling, uncoupling, highway miles, in-town driving, taking trucks through DOT weigh stations, and chaining tires in real-life scenarios that people will face over-the-road. Bud and Cathy have a great approach for taking a student from the shallow end of the pool to the deep water without putting them in situations beyond their grasp or that they haven’t been trained for. I’m amazed when I talk to others in trucking about how there had been no set curriculum when they trained for a CDL, how much felt like it was winged, or how disinterested some of their instructors were. It’s such a critical and potentially dangerous profession; it requires careful and highly involved instruction.
The second thing that sets us apart is culture. Bud and Cathy have invested a lot in creating a proper and professional culture at the school. Bud is old-school. Even when we were pulling loads over the road, we wore our Aisling company shirts tucked in and tidy. Bud is fastidious about every element of preparation and presentation. Likewise, any new instructors Aisling Truck Academy takes on are trained in the Aisling culture and approach. They’re taught that it’s important to be on message and on point in how each student is trained.
Another incredibly unique component Aisling offered was being able to take students on live loads that our trucking company was hauling so the students got a sense of what it would be like when they were working. All those things are critical. As a lot of trucking company executives can attest to, many students show up to orientation at varying levels of preparation. As a result, companies have to invest a lot of time and money to train certain students. While trucking companies pay a zillion dollars to law firms to cover them in terms of liability issues and a zillion more dollars on equipment like trucks, their most valuable piece of equipment is not a new Volvo, Freightliner, or Peterbilt, it’s a well-trained driver. We try and provide those so that when they show up for orientation, they are ready.
With the trucking industry facing many challenges, from driver shortages to safety concerns, what do you believe are the most important changes or improvements that need to be made to ensure the industry’s future success?
Training. As I said above, a trucking company’s most valuable piece of equipment is its driver. I’ve noticed changes like Swift and CR England have shut down some of their company-specific training schools. Something I liked about the idea of academies tied to specific companies was that the companies had control over the training their prospective future employee would receive. From my novice point of view, it seems like the insanely high driver turnover rate trucking companies experience is a massive problem. If students receive thorough training, the early period of trucking would not be so fraught.
This is anecdotal, but I have heard of drivers who come out of school, go through a quick orientation, and then find themselves across the country far from home a couple of weeks later. They feel so overwhelmed that they start thinking about the day that they’ll have legally worked off their obligation to the company for compensating the cost of their CDL training before they quit.
In trucking, the journey from not knowing how to drive a manual transmission car to being a licensed trucker with full endorsements can take a month. After that, some people are thrown into the deep end of a pool and learn through the trial and error of being over the road. It seems like if more care is taken with the earlier phases of training, the possibility of companies retaining drivers and not having to go through the process of recruiting new drivers, paying for their CDLs, only to wash, rinse, and repeat the cycle less than a year later would help immensely.
One thing we talked about at Aisling was adding an extra week on the four to really get students prepared for what they were going to deal with at orientation for the different companies. While I know new things have been implemented to try and counter the “Just borrow Uncle Bob’s truck to pass the CDL test,” there’s still a lot of leeway and grey areas in trucking schools. It’s in the details. For instance, allowing schools to use short trailers for training as opposed to the 53’ trailers you’ll be encountering in a real work environment is just one small but not insignificant issue that bears looking into.
How have your experiences in Hollywood influenced your approach to running Aisling Truck Academy, and do you see any crossover between acting and leadership in this space?
One time, Bud and I were hauling a trailer for Lowe’s from Los Angeles back up to the Portland area, and I was talking about working in Hollywood. I said, “But in the real world…” and Bud cut me off. “There’s no such thing as ‘the not real world’,” he said. “Every work environment has its requirements and challenges.” I loved that perspective. It’s true. I’m not the most talented person, but one thing that helped me in the acting world was preparation. When I first got my chance at auditions, I was grateful for the opportunity, and while I knew I might not get the part, it wasn’t going to be because I hadn’t spent hours or days memorizing the material and being ready for my shot.
The same goes for when I was a janitor at a place called the West Hollywood Drug and Alcohol Center. My co-worker, Chris Davis, said, “You want to be a good actor? Focus on being the best mopper when you mop and the best sweeper when you sweep. How you do anything is how you’ll do everything.” The same concepts apply to trucking.
My parents were hard workers. They came here from Ireland when I was three and just dug in and worked hard. I worked for my dad for years, and for every three hours I worked, I got paid an hour of minimum wage. He was a hard and demanding boss, but my dad showed me an approach and an attitude toward work that I think is healthy — all work is honorable and something you should give your all to when you are doing it.
In Hollywood, the crews work incredibly hard, sometimes 18 hours a day. The work environments are very organized and function like well-oiled machines. I know people think about the cushy and glamorous lifestyle of people in entertainment, but for the people who crew the shows and movies, the work is a grind, and I’m never not amazed and impressed by their work ethic. I hope in some small way, I show respect for them by trying my hardest when I’m working.
Regarding Aisling Trucking and Truck Academy, its success is all Bud, Cathy, and Josh’s doing — not me at all, save for really being an angel investor and having some ideas in the space. Since 2012, I’ve been on the road so much doing “Vikings,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “Law & Order: SVU,” and “Gotham,” Bud and Cathy had to take care of the trucking. Since then, I also started a hardwood company with Kevin Frison in Oregon and am still acting and writing, but through it all, the truth is that we are all workers among workers. The best thing in whatever we do is to try and honor the people around us by pulling our fair share.
