By Grace Galarraga
The trucking industry is vast but tends to be overlooked. Goods and cargo are delivered nationwide every day, but we don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Corisa Carter has been part of this industry since 1999, reaching new heights every year. She went from beginning in an entry level position to owning her own trucking company, CM Transportation LLC, which has been in operation since 2011. Her passion for her work has allowed her to achieve greatness in her field. In 2022, she hosted the first Trucking Expo out of Charleston, South Carolina where she was able to educate her community and expand general knowledge on the trucking industry.
Bronze Magazine had the opportunity to talk with her about her journey so far and what’s in store for the future. Her tenacity and kindness permeate everything she says and can be felt even through a phone interview.
Bronze Magazine: Tell me about how you got started in this industry. How did you get to where you are now?
Corisa: I’m a trucking agent in the transportation and logistics industry. My career began in 1999. I accepted an entry level position as a customer service representative for one of the ocean container companies. My job there was to dispatch the loads from the port to different trucking companies. I met a gentleman when I was dispatching to his company who told me, and I’ll never forget he said, “You don’t meet many people in this industry who have the ‘it factor’ Corisa, and you have the ‘it factor.’ I think you could grow and flourish in this business.” I transferred from dispatching trucking companies to working for the trucking companies. He offered me a position and I became a terminal manager in 2001 and I opened a terminal for him here in Charleston. After that, I continued to open different trucking terminals and managed them for different owners. So, I would do trucking startups, I would recruit drivers, set up the office and the processes and hire the office staff. I managed four trucking companies.
When the last company I was working for lost one of their large accounts, we had up to 75 drivers. Like with a lot of businesses, employees follow good paying jobs, and it’s the same thing in trucking. So, the drivers followed the money and we went from 75 drivers to 25 drivers in the matter of a couple of weeks. The drivers that stayed, encouraged me to step out and do it myself. They said they were tired of working for bosses who sat behind a desk and may or may not pay them what they were worth and didn’t have empathy. I was on the front line and their loyalty was to me. So, that’s exactly what I did. I took those 8 drivers who would follow me anywhere and opened my own trucking terminal and that was in 2011. In 2022 I celebrated 11 years as an entrepreneur. I am an individual member LLC and I have five employees and right now, we have five owner operators who pull loads for us out of the port.
I always had a passion for teaching and training and wanted the guys to learn the business because I hated seeing them just sitting behind the steering wheel and driving. I wanted them to manage their money, to manage their health benefits. I liked educating them on the business, and I knew I had a purpose to get involved on a larger scale. So, in 2022, I brought my dream to fruition, and I had Charleston’s first trucking expo. We had a lineup of great speakers; they gave out great information. You paid a small fee to get in, but you had access to different venders who were providing information on the business. We had speakers from CDL schools, trucking companies, and safety and compliance. I just wanted to share some knowledge about the trucking community because just like you said, a lot of people don’t exactly know what it is that we do and how we do it.
Bronze Magazine: What drives your passion for the trucking industry?
Corisa: The answer to this question is actually one word and its people. I have a passion for people and once I got into the industry and I began to learn how it worked, I thought that it was amazing. Trucking keeps the world moving. If you got it, a truck brought it- all those little sayings that you’ve heard before. Once I started meeting people and building relationships, I not only strived to be a good trucking company to them and a good carrier to them, but I also started building relationships and developed friendships. My passion was to see their business grow and to spread the knowledge to the community. There’s a lot of money in this industry that I had no knowledge about, so it excited me when people became interested, especially during COVID, because there were a lot of positions in the transportation and logistics field that were remote. I started getting a lot of calls, asking how to get into the industry and asking for training and to be a mentor. I opened a mentorship for CM consulting as well. My passion grew from the people I was working with.
Even though I had little to no knowledge about the industry when I first started, the relationships that I gained allowed me to develop friendships across the country all the way from LA to New York to Miami since it is a nationwide business. I have people out of high school who are interested in getting into the industry, we have families who have been in trucking and who own trucks. When I first started, I dispatched a father and now dispatching his son for four years. I always tell him that it makes me feel old, but it is a generational industry as well. Once a family gets involved it gets passed down through the generations, so I like to make sure to share the knowledge that I’ve gained over the years. I like to share it with people, especially people who look like me.
Bronze Magazine: Is this industry, like so many industries have been in the past, dominated by men? As a woman of color did you feel that there were difficulties and challenges getting to where you are now?
Corisa: Absolutely, and like I’ve stated before, a lot of times in the transportation and logistics community, it’s a generational thing. A lot of the trucking companies that were here in Charleston were family owned, so there were women that were working. Perhaps they were doing payroll, perhaps they were dispatching but they weren’t the owners and weren’t the ones making decisions and they certainly were not people of color. There have been other Black owned trucking companies before. I entered the business in 2011. We weren’t the first Black owned company, but we are the largest one in Charleston and have been for the past five years. When the Charleston port switched over to a new system and they brought in the top ten carriers, I sat at that table. Out of the top ten largest trucking companies in Charleston, I was the only Black woman at the table. And that was just within the last five years, so 20 years ago, you can imagine that I probably turned a couple of heads walking through the door saying that I was a dispatcher.
To be honest, I personally believe that had the man I worked for when I first became a dispatcher listened to me, he probably wouldn’t have lost the account like he did. But ironically, he looked at me like ‘oh she’s a woman and she dispatches. No Corisa, I think I’m going to stick with this rate’ and I said ‘okay.’ So yes, it has its challenges. Still to this day, I believe the only reason I’m offered some of the contracts is probably because of color, but the challenges have been there in the beginning and still remain.
Bronze Magazine: Let’s talk about the Charleston Truck Expo. I know it had around 1,500 attendees, which is incredible! What was it like setting up a huge event like that?
Corisa: It may sound silly but when I started talking with my friends, family, and my team at work, I just kind of had it in my mind that it was going to be like throwing a Christmas party. We throw an annual Christmas party which maybe has 150 to 200 people, so I thought, how hard could it be? It ended up surpassing my expectations and we had no idea that we were going to receive the response that we did with up to 1,500 attendees. There were over 30 vendors, we gave away scholarships, but the preparation for it was really bringing my dream to life. The vision was to put people like me (who had been in the industry and who had different knowledge of various parts of the industry) in one room and ask us whatever you wanted to ask us, to describe what it is that we do and how we got there and answer any questions from people interested in doing the same thing that we do. To me, that was the easy part. The advertising and behind the scenes stuff that made it all possible was due to my excellent team.
Other than that, it’s a family unit between my husband and my children and even my mother-in-law and sister-in-law. From ordering swag bag items to stuffing the bags to getting registration and getting shirts made. I just had a great group of people and volunteers that brought it all together. The main objective was to be able to share knowledge and to introduce the community to our industry, so that’s where the food trucks came in. We had an inflatable maze for the kids, we had the radio station out there and we advertised it to be a family fun event. One of the passions I’ve gotten from my family in Kentucky is to eat, drink and be merry, and if you could put all that together that ends up in a good time. It was beyond my imagination. I want it to continue to grow and travel to different cities, to bring the same vision to not just here in Charleston but maybe Charlotte, North Carolina, Atlanta Georgia, Miami, Florida. Our plan is to take the expo and travel to most of the cities that have ports to bring my knowledge and awareness of transportation and logistics.
We are in the planning stages of putting together next year’s expo in Charlotte, North Carolina. The date will be October 23 and the format will be the same, so that I can bring industry professionals to the stage.
Bronze Magazine: What’s it like knowing that an event you created will have a legacy in your industry, since it’s going to be happening again next year in Charlotte?
Corisa: I know in a lot of our entrepreneur groups like women in business, when you have a vision that comes to life, we always use the analogy of birthing a baby. Just like the passion and the love that you have when you actually spring something into the world and to see all your hard work and purity has actually paid off, it was kind of like that. I was still more overwhelmed when I had my three children, but that’s a good analogy because you go through the pains of putting it together but when it arrives and you see that it’s been a successful event, you really can’t explain the joy. I do know that it was a confirmation that I’m on the purpose that God had for me. I always thought that I had the desire to spread knowledge and to teach, but I could never figure out how working in trucking was going to reach the masses. Once the expo came about, I was very overwhelmed, and I’m very grateful and very humbled by the support. It was amazing, it’s an amazing feeling.
Bronze Magazine: Why do you feel like providing scholarships is important for people wanting to get into the industry and can you tell me a little bit about the recipients of this year’s scholarships?
Corisa: We offered three 500-dollar scholarships for CDL applicants. The conditions were that you had to be enrolled in a CDL school and CM transportation would pay the 500 dollars towards their tuition. A lot of times, people get discouraged about their future and where the next step is for them to go. Most of the time it has to do with finances. People don’t go to college because they can’t afford it, people don’t go to a trade school because they can’t afford it. My team and I just thought that it would be great to say ‘hey, if this is something that you want to do, we’ll help you.’ Not only will we help you by putting on these expos so that you could come out and ask questions, but also so you could learn how to establish your business correctly.
You could learn what an EIN number is, how to get your motor carrier authority, and not only that, we’ll help you financially because we want to build our community. We want our children and the next generation and our children’s children to know that there is somebody out here that’s in your corner, especially if there’s someone like me with a vision. If I didn’t have the support that I had, then the expo wouldn’t have come to life. So, if someone has a dream and desire, we just wanted to be a little bit a part of that, like a ray of sunshine saying, hey there is help out there.
The son of one of the ladies that volunteered applied for the scholarship. She and I had been working in the industry together for about 15 years. I wasn’t part of the selection committee because I didn’t want people to say, ‘she just picked people she knew.’ For her son to be an applicant and for him to win, that was amazing. When I got to call his name, it was incredible because I had been watching him play football since he was 6 years old and he’s 18 years old now. He decided going to college wasn’t for him. He had had enough of school after 12 years and he had seen his mom work around trucking.
He wanted to get his CDL, so he applied for the scholarship, and he was awarded. Quite frankly, his response was so truthful because there is money to be made in this industry and he wants to work for himself, he wants to be a business owner so he thought the path that he could take would be to get his CDL and get his own truck and possibly his own trucking company in the future. When we discussed the scholarships, it also made me realize that this thing is bigger than CM Transportation. It also allowed me to build a legacy for my family for us to open up our first non-profit organization, our first 5013c, which is the transportation education foundation. I added my children as members because they worked just as hard as I did on the expo. Hopefully after I’m gone and hopefully after they’re gone, my grandkid’s kids will still be hosting expos nationwide.
Bronze Magazine: What kind of stuff gets transported by your trucks? What’s the weirdest thing that’s been on your transportation trucks?
Corisa: We did have a weird account a few years ago. What we delivered was pepper mash to Winston-Salem, North Carolina to the port of Charleston and we had no idea what pepper mash was. The driver called one day and said, ‘do you know what’s in this container?’ I said, ‘sure it’s pepper mash’ and he said, ‘that pepper mash is what is turned into hot sauce.’ So, we delivered the pepper mash to TW Garner in Winston-Salem who manufactures Texas Pete Hot Sauce! If you ever look at the back of a bottle of Texas Pete, you’ll see that it was manufactured in Winston-Salem and I delivered those loads there.
