(WGHP) — Clarissa Rankin is conquering a man's world. But make no mistake, she's doing it her way.
“We learn this truck a little bit differently from men,” says Clarissa about the way she drives her freight truck. “We’re very gentle. Women are very caressing to the steering wheel.”
She comes from a long line of folks in transportation. Her grandmother ran – how would we best describe this? Something of an, “unlicensed taxi service,” in the Myrtle Beach area, nearly a hundred years ago. That idea of taking people or things has been in her family ever since. But it isn’t where Clarissa began her professional life.
“I had my bachelors in criminal justice and I was working in the prison system and the school system,” she says. “That doggone prison system was a headache but I wanted to follow my degree and I wanted to stop offenders from reoffending.”
But not only was she not making much money, but she also had $50,000 in student loans to repay. It was time to make a change and trucking seemed to be the right deal.
“You can make great money. My first year I was around, I made about $50,000,” says Clarissa. “That was just driving – company driver – and that was like just going warehouse to warehouse and then, after that, it was over. I made over $130,000,” as a trucker.
Then, she discovered social media. Well, she knew about social media – she was posting things on YouTube and Instagram pretty much every day but had next to no followers.
“I was doing YouTube for years and I wasn’t getting seen but I didn’t care,” she says. “I was talking to two people even though I didn’t care and I was going to give up. I was like, ‘Ugh, I can’t keep giving my time to these, not being seen, what am I doing this for?’ And the day I was going to give up, my husband said, ‘Hey, post on this,’ and I posted on TikTok. And as soon as I posted on TikTok, as soon as I posted, it went viral.”
She now has more than a million-and-a-half followers who love the content she posts which can be anywhere from informative to irreverent.
“Now I make more with social media,” than she does driving, Clarissa says. “With social media, I can make almost $5,000 within 30-seconds with a video,” for products like Febreze.
Despite her success, she says she is still a mother and wife, first. But she’s added businesswoman to that list, recently starting a cosmetics line that is sold in truck stops across the country. And that’s why you may not see her behind the wheel of her big rig in five or ten years.
“I see myself being an entrepreneur, having my cosmetics line in truck stops, I see myself educating, doing motivational speaking, traveling the world, educating more women to get into trucking,” says Clarissa.
You can find Clarissa on her Youtube, Instagram or Facebook.
See some of the videos that have made her famous in this edition of the Buckley Report.
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