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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. 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 it helped him in the fields and it was a great way to grow up. When I was 14 my father he had been sick and he just got up and just passed out and I was and I mean he just right then he just died. I left my mother and I and my little brother Dwayne 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 and my husband started drinking and it just become a very very abusive relationship both physically and mentally. 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 in Georgia. I said well you know I'd like to go to Georgia and so they 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 40-foot van and all of our belongings took up about 10 feet of that fan 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 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 1974 we had the opportunity to buy this little small trucking company that had 15 trucks and 30 trailers and we only had like $500 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 them to our customer and he would process them write a check we'd do the same thing the driver we'd meet just 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 $500 and do what we did now because of the way that the industry is and the way that people want to pay your invoices. Now customers want to wait 60, 120 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.
Marcia was finally getting the business on solid footing until the ground was taken out from under her. 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 site for one of our customers and while we were there I saw this billboard and it was advertising a 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 and in his ear and in his throat and we went home and 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 how could this be? He was in the hospital for three days to where he 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 and they they just couldn't stop it and they took him into surgery and he basically coded 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 80s and there really wasn't any women that was in the that was in the transportation business. Certainly 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 30 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 60, 70 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. 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. 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. I mean 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 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. And we've been listening to Marcia Taylor and she's the owner of the trucking company Bennett International Group. What 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 but for 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 are Pollyanna Sheeran our American stories. Everything comes with a price. Everything.
When we come back more of Marcia Taylor's story an American dreamer story my goodness as good a one as we've had here on this show after these commercial messages more with our American story. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa wash away your worries with friendly prices. That's right sofas start at just $699. And now's the perfect time to upgrade during the memorial day sale.
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Knix, for your leaks, for your life. And we return 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. 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 carbs, that require a little bit more work to haul.
Anything that's too large to be hauled that needs to be driven, you know, we'll put a driver in it, you name it. So today we're made up of 14 different companies that all do different types of transportation. We have about 3,200 drivers and owner operators and about 400 different offices. We're an international company. We do a lot of ag 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 A.A. and E., which is ammunition, explosives, so forth. There's only 17 carriers allowed to move A.A. 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, then we'll get involved with FEMA to help move those units. In fact, they're the largest mover of manufactured housing, better known as mobile homes, in America. They're the largest mover for the United States Department of Defense, and they're also the largest driveway company in the country, meaning their pickup truck drivers deliver upwards of 450 campers and RVs across the country every single week.
And it doesn't end there. We're very involved in oil and gas and do a lot with the wind industry. We move 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 900 ton, and so that's a very niche market.
I think God has just always led us where we needed to go. Nearly 71 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 60,000 more drivers are needed by trucking companies, and that number is predicted to reach 100,000 in just the next few years. The trucking industry is always up and down. I mean, there's always a lot of things going on, but probably one of the 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. Our retention rate is about 39 percent, which is really very good. A lot of companies' retention rate is over 100 percent. That means her competitors are losing all of their drivers for the year, and then some. 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 80s, 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 a day off, somebody else would give them a third day. And so we were able to make our way through it by not having to lay anybody off. And in the 2008 recession?
Same thing. 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. With such a big milestone in the books, does Marcia, who is now 74, have any intention of retiring soon?
Like most successful business owners, 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 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. They 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. And not just through her business, but through her foundation, Marcia has made a difference. About five years ago, we started a foundation based on Christian values, where we would give back 10% of our earnings each year. One of the things we do is we have a friend that runs a camp in Old Town, Florida. It's a Christian camp, and we take a week. Every year, we call it Camp Bennett, and we sponsor employees' children or 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 40 or 50 kids will be saved, and several, they'll be baptized.
That's one of the things that we enjoy. We just sponsored several wreaths across America. We put 15,000 wreaths on the graves at Andersonville Cemetery. From back during the Civil War, maybe they're old, old gravesites that there's nobody left that remembers those gravesites. Drivers will deliver wreaths to the cemetery and get people wreaths to place on these gravesites.
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, us saying prayers before meetings ended up, he came 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. And that was Marcia Taylor. What a voice. What a life story. Three babies by 19, 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, moved to another state with not much money, gave her 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 of.
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.
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See details at T-Mobile dot com. This is Jana Kramer from Wine Down with Jana Kramer. Have you ever felt that uneasy anxiety when the 4pm hour strikes, the creeping meal related distress that happens when you don't quite feel prepared? You know, dinner dread. Let's get rid of that unpleasant feeling forever with one word, Stouffer's. No matter what happens, you'll have a dinner plan that everyone loves with Stouffer's. Some chicken enchiladas or cheesy chicken and broccoli pasta bake is always welcome, whether it is plan A or plan D, delicious. When the clock strikes dinner, think Stouffer's. Shop now for family favorites. You're listening to an I heart podcast.
