May 22, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Marcia Taylor went from being a pregnant teenager to running one of the largest trucking companies in America, Bennett International Group. In this episode, Marcia shares how she pulled the fat from the fire and became one of the most influential female business leaders in the nation today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories, and it's time
for our American Dreamers series.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Today, Aubrey Wriggle.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Brings us the story of someone you likely don't know
but will be glad to have met.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
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
(01:19):
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
(01:40):
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
(02:03):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:44):
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
(03:06):
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 and seventy four we
(03:27):
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 builled, and one
(03:50):
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
(04:12):
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.
(04:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Marcia was finally getting the business on solid footing until
the ground was taken out from under her.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
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 emphasemas. So we went to this smoking
(05:15):
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. 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
(05:35):
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
(05:56):
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.
(06:20):
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
(06:42):
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
(07:04):
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
(07:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
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.
(08:16):
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
(08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:45):
a one as we've had here on this show. After
these commercial messages, more with our American Stories, and we
(10:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
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 they're pickup truck drivers.
Deliver upwards of four hundred and fifty campers and RVs
across the country every single week, and it doesn't in there.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
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
(12:37):
where we needed to go.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
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.
(13:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
That means her competitors are losing all of their drivers
for the year and then some.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
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
(13:58):
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
(14:20):
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,
(14:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
And in the two thousand and eight recession, the same thing.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
a big milestone for us.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
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. Absolutely not.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
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
(16:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
And not just through her business, but through her foundation.
Marcia has made a difference.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
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, because Christian camp, and we take a
week every year. We call it Camp Bennett, and we
(16:58):
sponsor eployee's 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
(17:19):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
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
(18:53):
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 Teller's story an American dreamer's story, as good as
(19:17):
any we've done here on our American Stories.
And we continue with our American stories, and it's time
for our American Dreamers series.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Today, Aubrey Wriggle.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Brings us the story of someone you likely don't know
but will be glad to have met.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
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
(01:19):
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
(01:40):
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
(02:03):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:44):
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
(03:06):
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 and seventy four we
(03:27):
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 builled, and one
(03:50):
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
(04:12):
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.
(04:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Marcia was finally getting the business on solid footing until
the ground was taken out from under her.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
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 emphasemas. So we went to this smoking
(05:15):
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. 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
(05:35):
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
(05:56):
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.
(06:20):
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
(06:42):
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
(07:04):
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
(07:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
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.
(08:16):
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
(08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:45):
a one as we've had here on this show. After
these commercial messages, more with our American Stories, and we
(10:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
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 they're pickup truck drivers.
Deliver upwards of four hundred and fifty campers and RVs
across the country every single week, and it doesn't in there.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
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
(12:37):
where we needed to go.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
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.
(13:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
That means her competitors are losing all of their drivers
for the year and then some.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
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
(13:58):
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
(14:20):
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,
(14:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
And in the two thousand and eight recession, the same thing.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
a big milestone for us.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
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. Absolutely not.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
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
(16:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
And not just through her business, but through her foundation.
Marcia has made a difference.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
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, because Christian camp, and we take a
week every year. We call it Camp Bennett, and we
(16:58):
sponsor eployee's 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
(17:19):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
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
(18:53):
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 Teller's story an American dreamer's story, as good as
(19:17):
any we've done here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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