From Driver to Founder: The Story Behind Digital Permit Book

My driver Chris pulled into a scale house somewhere. DOT officer standing at the window, and Chris on the phone with me because he can't find the registration for the truck he's sitting in.

It's in the binder. It's supposed to be in the binder. It's not in the binder — or it is, but it's the one from two renewals ago.

So I'd stop whatever I was doing, dig through a filing cabinet, find the current copy, and text him a photo. Fifteen minutes, sometimes forty. Multiply that by a fleet of a hundred trucks and you start to understand why I stopped thinking of paperwork as an annoyance and started thinking of it as the actual business.

How I got here

I started trucking in 2007 as a FedEx Ground driver. In 2012, I got my own authority — and nearly failed my New Entrant Safety Audit over one missing piece of my drug and alcohol program. That was my first lesson that in trucking, paperwork can shut you down faster than any breakdown.

I grew that company to more than 100 trucks. Along the way I saw it all: drivers who couldn't find the right permit at inspections, binders stuffed with outdated documents, and a safety team buried in filing instead of running the operation.

Why I built Digital Permit Book

Before trucking, I worked in tech. Somewhere between roadside inspections and missing registrations, I realized the problem wasn't the drivers. It was the binder.

So in 2023 we built what I wished Chris had that day at the scale house: One-Tap Inspection, the first of its kind in trucking. The driver taps once, and every document for the driver, vehicle, trailer, and company is on one screen — current, readable, and available even with no signal. No phone call to the office. No filing cabinet. No photo texted from forty miles away.

Where we are today

Since 2023, Digital Permit Book has helped more than 500 fleets and 50,000 drivers leave the paper binder behind — from owner-operators to fleets with 1,000+ trucks, including carriers like Paul Logistics, Western Flyer Xpress, and Meritum Energy.

But we're not a tech company looking in from the outside. We've sat in the driver's seat, and we've made that phone call.

Milestones

• 2007 — Starts driving for FedEx Ground
• 2012 — Launches his own trucking company
• 100+ trucks — Grows the fleet past 100 trucks
• 2023 — Launches Digital Permit Book and One-Tap Inspection
• 2026 — 500+ fleets and 50,000+ drivers

What I'm building next

Running a fleet taught me that permits weren't the only place money leaked. Detention that never got billed, short-paid invoices, the same repair done twice, fuel card exceptions nobody caught: it all lives between the ELD, fuel cards, tolls and the TMS, and no single system shows it. So I built Nerivo IQ, fleet cost analysis software that connects those systems and shows where a fleet is losing money, with the records to back it up. It's built for fleets running 50 or more trucks.

Learn more: Nerivo IQ fleet cost analysis →

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Thanks for being part of the journey.
— DJ, CEO & Founder