From Five Trucks to a Training Range
Christina Lim didn't grow up wanting to be in trucking. She bartended, sold vacuums door to door, ran an Amazon FBA private-label business, helped NFL athletes set up nonprofits, and even talked her way into a director role at a publicly traded AI tech company during the pandemic — all before she'd ever met a trucker.
That changed at the Sand Dunes in 2020, when she and her partner met an owner-operator who told them he was making around $200,000 a year running his own authority. By 2021 they had their first truck. They scaled Travel Star Transport to five power-only trucks running Amazon Relay and dedicated regional contracts across the Arizona–California–Nevada–Utah hub.
Three years later, she shut it down to open OTR Drive School.
The Operator Lesson: Learn on Somebody Else's Dime
If you run a freight business, here's why this story matters. Lim's hardest-won advice for anyone eyeing owner-operator life is to not buy the truck first.
"Learn on somebody else's dime, become a driver... start building those relationships while you're making money, rather than you having to put your own money on the line first."
For most people in freight, the truck is the dream purchase. Lim argues the opposite: the truck is the last thing you buy. The first things you build are relationships and your numbers — the two things she says held her own carrier back.
Why She Walked Away From the Carrier
The turning point wasn't profit. It was safety. As Travel Star grew, Lim started interviewing newer drivers who couldn't reverse, and hearing a story that scared her: operators who admitted they paid an instructor roughly $500 to pass them rather than actually learn.
"This person paid his way to get a CDL, and now he's operating not just a vehicle, he's operating an 80,000 lb weapon."
The second gut-punch came from her own equipment. A driver she'd brought on as an instructor — with a resume showing more than 20 years of experience — slip-seated into another driver's truck for an Amazon load, never set the brake, and let the semi roll into the facility, hitting trailers. Damage to the truck came to roughly $15,000. The same instructor, she says, also raided the regular driver's refrigerator. She let him go.
Her takeaway: a great resume doesn't equal a great instructor, and personality and care matter more than tenure.
What It Actually Takes to Build a CDL School
This is the part most people underestimate. Lim broke down the moving pieces.
Location and Skills Pads
Her training range runs 2.5 acres, fully paved and DMV-coded. Acreage is driven by how many skills pads you can fit — the areas where students practice straight-line backing, alley docking and pre-trip. She runs three skills pads, with students rotating between skills, pre-trip and over-the-road driving. You also need separate office space for the classroom (ELDT) portion.
Curriculum
Lim built a curriculum, then had to scrap it when ELDT (entry-level driver training) got federally mandated and changed the requirements. She bought an approved pre-made curriculum to get licensed, then spent eight months building her own again. The difference she's chasing: most schools teach only the bare minimum to pass the CDL. Hers adds trip planning, map reading, paper logs, and Hazmat awareness — the things she says make a driver safer and more profitable on the road.
"Trip planning is your money. If you know how to trip plan, that's how you're going to make your money."
Licensing
OTR is third-party certified, meaning students train and test there — but the instructor can't be the certifier. Nevada also requires instructors to hold an occupational business license, a CDL-like process with a written test, pre-trip and skills evaluation.
Instructors
Good licensed instructors are scarce, and Lim says the bad ones just circulate between schools. So she started training her own — pulling experienced drivers (often local drivers ready to come off the road) who have the right personality, then putting them through their occupational license. Her rule: "Most skills can be taught, but personality can't be."
Startup Costs
Lim's rough breakdown: around $50k per truck (older trucks, not new), acreage ranging from about $5k to $25k, plus office space, salaries and insurance. A mistake she made early: bringing 2020 Kenworth T680s over from her trucking company. They weren't built for stop-and-go idling on a training range and broke down more than they did on the highway.
The Business Model
The school charges tuition for CDL training. Lim estimates the national market runs roughly $5,000–$7,000 — and pushed back hard on a previous guest's $9,000 figure. Students can fund it through programs like WIOA, second-chance nonprofits, or carrier-sponsored schooling (often around $8,000, paid down roughly $200 per month worked, with the balance owed if you quit the contract early). She generally steers students toward paying out of pocket so they're not locked to one carrier once their first six months open up the market.
A placement director is core to the model — Lim says there's no point getting a CDL if you don't get employed, and students apply for jobs (including pre-hires from mega carriers) while still in school.
The Numbers and the Goal
In its first year, OTR Drive School graduated 150 people. Lim says roughly 25% of her students are women — many of them younger — and the school also works heavily with veterans and couples training to run as teams. Her stated long-term goal: change one million lives by helping people earn their CDL, which would require a national footprint.
She's also building tech to support training — drone, 360-degree and driver-seat video — because her philosophy is teaching drivers to problem-solve, not just hit cones.
"The point of learning how to drive is not to hit your points... we're teaching you how to problem solve."
The Founder Mindset
Lim's operating philosophy: "act now, refine later." And the reframe that keeps her going through the catastrophes — the rolled truck, the lost months waiting on a license — is treating each disaster as a better chapter for her founder story.
"I would much rather live my life full of failures than what-ifs."