How a 19-Year-Old Single Mother Built the Largest Female-Owned Trucking Company

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories, and it’s time for our American Dreamers series.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Today, Aubrey Wriggle

00:00:16
Speaker 1: brings us the story of someone you likely don’t know but will be glad to have met.

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Speaker 3: I got married at sixteen, and I had my first child when I was seventeen, and my next child at eighteen, my next child at nineteen. So I ended up with three babies, and finally my aunt told me to call the last one caboose and let it be the end.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: You’re listening to Marcia Taylor, likely the first woman to own and operate a trucking company, Bennett International Group. But before she was a leading businesswoman, she was a young mom of three babies, growing a startup business into what is now one of the biggest trucking companies in America.

00:00:57
Speaker 3: I grew up in southern Illinois on a small farm with my mother and father and brother that was seven years younger than I was. My mother always had a big garden, and she had a lot of chickens, and I would help her can, and my dad always had a lot of wheat and soybeans and corn, so would help him in the fields, and it was a great way to grow up. When I was fourteen, my father, he had been sick, and he just got up and just passed out, and I mean he just right then. He just died and left my mother and I and my little brother, Duyane, with a farm. It was just a devastating time for me. I ended up being the kind of the responsible one in the family. I married really early. I think I was being a little rebellious. My husband and I lived on the farm, and he worked on the railroad, and I was a housewife. Neither one of us was really ready to be married, nor ready for the responsibility that having three small children. So my husband started drinking, and it just become a very, very abusive relationship, both physically and mentally. Well, I knew I was going to have to try to get away, to get out of that situation. Some of the people in our neighborhood had bought the rights to this small trucking company, Georgia. I’d said, well, you know, I’d like to go to Georgia, and so there was an opening, and I jumped at the chance. I knew nothing about trucking, I mean literally nothing, but I knew it might be a way for me to get the children and to move to a different location. We loaded everything we had up with a truck and a forty-foot van, and all of our belongings took up about ten feet of that van, and we moved to Georgia and moved into a mobile home and was able to at that point file for divorce. I was working, and I had the children were like the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Actually, the man that I went to work for, we ended up getting together, and we ended up getting married. My mother had not been in the best of health. We called her and asked her if she wanted to come to Georgia and live with us and help with the children so I could really focus on work. So we worked really hard, and in nineteen seventy-four we had the opportunity to buy this little small trucking company that fifteen trucks and thirty trailers, and we only had like five hundred dollars in cash to be able to start this business, but they sold it to us on credit. In order for us to make payroll, I would do all the billing on Wednesday, get everything billed, and one of us would take all of our invoices and meet one of our drivers halfway. Our driver would pick up the invoices, take him to our customer, and he would process them, write a check. We’d do the same thing. The driver, we’d meet this halfway, pick up the check, deposit in the bank, and so I could make payroll on Friday. Our customer helped save us all through that time by getting our invoices processed so I could make payroll. I don’t think you could start a business with five hundred dollars and do what we did now because of the way that the industry is in the way that people want to pay your invoices now. Customers want to wait sixty, one hundred and twenty days before they pay you. It was a difficult time, but I looked back and it was, it was a good time. We were working to build this company together.

00:04:44
Speaker 2: Marcia was finally getting the business on solid footing until the ground was taken out from under her.

00:04:51
Speaker 3: My husband, JD, was a heavy smoker, and it was really affecting his health. We had gone to Houston, Texas, to look at a rail side for one of our customers, and while we were there, I saw this billboard, and it was advertising and stop smoking clinic. He knew he needed to stop smoking because it was causing him to begin to have emphysema. So we went to this smoking clinic that was attached to one of the large hospitals. They injected him in the nose, in his ear, and in his throat, and we went home. In the middle of the next week, we were at work, and my husband said, you know, I don’t feel well. I think I need to go home. So he went home, and whenever I got there, I went into our bedroom to check on him, and he was just burning up. So I said, I think we need to take you to the emergency room because he never got sick. So they started checking him, and his blood pressure kept dropping. So they came, and they said, well, I think we’re going to take him up to intensive care. We just want to see what’s going on. The next morning, at about six o’clock, they came out, and they said, I want you to prepare yourself because I don’t think he’s going to make it. And I was just like, what? Well, how could this be? He was in the hospital for three days to where his body just started shutting down through those injections. He had developed a Gram-negative bacteria. They had injected this bacteria into his body. They had to first find out what kind of injections he had gotten, which really wasn’t much of anything. Then they had to discover what this bacteria was, and they just couldn’t stop it, and they took him into surgery, and he basically codd in surgery, and he died the next morning. So all at once, I was just kind of left with this business that we had finally had gotten a bank that would take a chance on us, and had gotten a small credit line. And now this is back in the eighties, and there really wasn’t any women that was in that was in the transportation business. Nobody run a trucking company. And I was really worried that the bank would call our note because they wouldn’t trust, you know, a woman. And I have three small children that I still have to take care of, and my mom. But, you know, I just had to put all my faith in God that whatever was supposed to happen, he would see me through. My drivers all just kind of gathered around. There was thirty people that worked here at that time, and everybody just said, look, we can do this. We just went to work. I bet I work, I don’t know, sixty, seventy hours a week. It took a lot, because we’re not in a business that’s an eight-to-five business. You don’t turn the responsibility off whenever you go home.

00:07:43
Speaker 2: Through her faith, the support of her employees, and her dedication to the company, Marcia pulled through. But her children were still small, and her success came at a cost.

00:07:55
Speaker 3: I feel guilty that I didn’t get to spend more time with my children when they were growing up. I wish I could go back and change that. My mom was there, thankfully, and she always made sure that there was a meal on the table, that they got to the ball games, that they got wherever they needed to get to. But I feel like I missed a lot. Now I’ve gotten to work with my children now, you know, and so I’m very fortunate in that way. When they were small, they would come to work with me. They’ve always had to be involved. When they got sick, they slept on a cot behind my desk. They really learned it from the ground up. It’s just been a great blessing to me to be able to work with my family and children. Sometimes they’ll say, well, you know, it’s not always easy to work with your mother, and I say, well, you know, it’s not always easy to work with your kids either. But even my grandchildren, I don’t get to spend near as much time with my grandchildren as I’d like to, even though I have four of them that work here. It’s had a lot of ups and downs, but God’s always seen me through.

00:09:00
Speaker 1: And we’ve been listening to Marcia Taylor, and she’s the owner of the trucking company, Bennett International Group. Brought a story thus far. And we’re going to hear more on the other side. And my goodness, now we know, now you know, and we try to do this for you to empathize with the people meeting payroll, because it’s no small task, and it’s a heck of a responsibility to be responsible not just for yourself and your family, of dozens of other families, and to have that pressure and the price that’s paid. I mean, she had sacrifices to make and regrets, and none of these success stories or Pollyanna. She here and Our American Stories, everything comes with a price. Everything. When we come back, more of Marcia Taylor’s story, an American Dreamers story. My goodness, as good a one as we’ve had here on this show. After these commercial messages, more with Our American Stories, and we returned to Marcia Taylor’s story here on Our American Stories. And when we last left off, well, Marcia knew she had to differentiate herself from all of her competitors in order to survive, and so she did.

00:10:24
Speaker 3: We started to say, what could be our specialty? What can we do that limits our competition? Our niche is things that are a little bigger, a little heavier, that require harps, that require a little bit more work to haul, anything that’s too large to be hall that needs to be driven, you know, we’ll put a driver in it, we name it. So today, we’re made up of fourteen different companies that all do different types of transportation. We have about thirty-two hundred drivers and owner-operators and about four hundred day offices. We’re an international company. We do a lot of egg equipment, air conditioners, rockets. We do a lot of work for the government. One of the newest ventures that we’ve just gotten into is AA and E, which is ammunition explosives so forth. There’s only seventeen carriers allowed to move AA and E. We just did the Mercedes-Benz Stadium and the big falcon that’s out in front. We delivered that falcon. We’re international. We import and export, and we bring a lot of wine in from Argentina. We export a lot of sweet potatoes. We move a lot of manufactured housing, and when there’s some sort of a national disaster, if they require manufactured housing, that we’ll get involved with FEMA to help move those units.

00:11:53
Speaker 2: In fact, they’re the largest mover of manufactured housing, better known as mobile homes, in America. They’re the largest for the United States Department of Defense, and they’re also the largest driveaway company in the country, meaning their pickup truck drivers. Deliver upwards of four hundred fifty campers and RVs across the country every single week, and it doesn’t in there.

00:12:14
Speaker 3: We’re very involved in oil and gas, and do a lot with the wind industry. We’ve moved big windmills that are being installed in all the wind farms, both by hauling and through our crane and rigging. Four years ago, we started a crane and rigging company. We have cranes up to nine hundred ton, and so that’s a very niche market. I think God has just always led us where we needed to go.

00:12:39
Speaker 2: Nearly seventy-one percent of all freight moved in the United States goes on trucks. Without truck drivers, our economy would come to a standstill. Yet, the American Trucking Association figures that sixty thousand more drivers are needed by trucking companies, and that number is predicted to reach one hundred thousand in just the next few years.

00:13:00
Speaker 3: Trucking industry is always up and down. I mean, there’s always a lot of things going on. But probably one of the most difficult things is finding really qualified drivers that want to get into this industry. When you do have a driver come to you, you want them to enjoy working for you, and you want them to stay. But our retention rate is about thirty-nine percent, which is really very good. A lot of companies’ retention rate is over one hundred percent.

00:13:31
Speaker 2: That means her competitors are losing all of their drivers for the year and then some.

00:13:36
Speaker 3: It’s a tough business, but we’ve got a lot of drivers that’s been with us for a lot of years. They get used to where they like to run; they get used to what they like to do; and, you know, they stay with us. Our business is usually one of the leading indicators of what’s happening in the economy. We’re usually the first to see it pick up and the first to see it slow down. Over the years, there’s been numerous times that we weren’t sure—if, you know, we were going to have enough money—whenever the bottom fell out of everything. In the eighties, we had made like a million dollars at that point in time, which was a lot of money for us. And it’s like the recession hit, and it’s just like everything just stopped. In two months, we had lost the million we had made and another million. We never really wanted to lay anybody off. We worked some flexible hours, and people that could would maybe take one day off, and then some of the people that couldn’t afford to take day off, somebody else would give them their day. And so we were able to make our way through it by not having to lay anybody off.

00:14:51
Speaker 2: And in the two thousand eight recession, the same thing.

00:14:54
Speaker 3: You just kind of buckle in, and you just manage your balance sheet. And one thing about our business—another reason I say God is so good—is because we do different types of things. It has always seemed like when one thing was really slow or bad, one piece of the industry something else was good. When things were so slow, we ended up getting a huge contract that saw us through. We’ve always come out of recessions and done well. Last year was one of the best years we have ever had in our industry, simply because I think there was so much pent-up business out there. You could just feel it. We did over a half a billion dollars. We’re pretty excited about that. That was a big milestone for us.

00:15:40
Speaker 2: With such a big milestone in the books, does Marcia, who is now seventy-four, have any intention of retiring soon like most successful business owners?

00:15:52
Speaker 3: Absolutely not. This is my family. There’s people that’s been here for many, many years. I can’t imagine not being here. About three or four years years ago, I guess my kids kind of said, you know, we’re tired. We’ve been working a lot, and they’ve been working a lot of years. They said, we’re ready to retire. I said, you know, okay, we’ll think about maybe selling off some, keeping some. But then I thought it’s not fair to my grandchildren. Their work here. This is a good place for them, and we just need to work as long as we can. Also, I firmly believe that you should get up every day and work to make a difference. I feel like I can do that here.

00:16:32
Speaker 2: And not just through her business, but through her foundation. Marcia has made a difference.

00:16:37
Speaker 3: About five years ago, we started a foundation based on Christian values where we would give back ten percent of our earnings each year. One of the things we do is we have a friend that runs a camp in Old Town, Florida, a Christian camp, and we take a week every year. We call it Camp Bennett, and we sponsor employees’ children and her grandchildren, and then we also sponsor kids that just maybe wouldn’t have the opportunity to go to the camp. Every year there’s usually like forty or fifty kids will be saved, and several they’ll be baptized. That’s one of the things that we enjoy. We just sponsored several reefs acrossed America. We put fifteen thousand reefs on the graves at Andersonville Cemetery from back during the Civil War. Maybe they’re old, old grave sides that there’s nobody left that remembers those grave sides. Drivers will deliver it reas the cemetery and get people re placed on these grave sides. It’s a very moving, and it’s a wonderful way to honor some of our veterans. We try to use this company to help show Christian love. I definitely feel that this is a ministry. It allows us to reach people that we might not reach otherwise, both through our foundation and then just every day. I had a vice president of safety, rough guy. Sometimes his language wasn’t the best. Just being here, being in this environment of saying prayers before meetings ended up became to Christ. And he had told me many times that he thought if he was not working in this environment, that probably would not have happened. Being able to use this company to help people is the greatest sense of fulfillment.

00:18:31
Speaker 1: And that was Marcia Taylor. What a voice! What a life story! Three babies by nineteen, small-town life in southern Illinois, which is like small-town rural life everywhere in this great country. But it made her who she was. A really difficult first marriage, a divorce, she took a chance to move to another state with not much money, gave a shot at a company and a business she didn’t even know, and my goodness, she knows it now. Five hundred million dollars in business, but that’s not what she’s most proud if you heard it: keeping the people together through a recession, not laying people off, and transmitting her values through work. And it is one of the great ways we do it, folks. What we do is often who we are and what we make of it. Marcia Taylor’s story, an American Dreamers story, as good as any we’ve done here on Our American Stories.