Bennett President Taylor Is Honored as Trucking’s Influential Woman of Year
This story appears in the April 7 print edition of Transport Topics.
Marcia Taylor, president of Bennett International Group, a trucking and logistics firm headquartered in McDonough, Ga., has been named trucking’s Influential Woman of the Year.
The award is given out annually by Women in Trucking, which held its presentation ceremony at the Truckload Carriers Association convention in Grapevine, Texas.
“I’m fortunate enough to receive awards for the company, but yesterday it was so funny,” Taylor told Transport Topics on March 28. “I carried the award around with me every place I went. I was so excited about it.”
The other finalists for the award were: Stephanie Klang, a driver for Con-way Truckload who also is an America’s Road Team captain; Amy Boerger, general manager of field sales and service at Cummins Inc.; and Kim Kaplan, president of K-Limited Carrier Ltd., a liquid bulk carrier in Toledo, Ohio.
Taylor and her husband, J.D. Garrison, bought Bennett in 1974, and today the company has a fleet of 2,700 trucks spread over several specialty divisions.
“When we bought it, we had 15 trucks and 30 trailers, and we had $500 in our pocket, which you couldn’t really do today,” Taylor recalled.
Taylor’s husband died in 1981, leaving her with three young children and about 125 trucks. She recalls persuading the bank to let her carry on and telephoning customers to say she was still in business.
“I called one of our customers and said we’re continuing on, and they said, ‘Well, we’ll give you a chance.’
“We had a couple of really good accounts that back in those days, we could do the billing on Thursday, meet one of our drivers halfway, and our customer would write us a check so we could make payroll on Friday,” she said.
Taylor had to build her company as she reared her children.
“My children grew up in it and, when they were little, if they got sick, they slept on a pallet behind my desk,” she said.
A can-do attitude grew the company to where it has a logistics division, 711 employees and 300 commissioned agents, she said.
The same attitude allowed the company, which had been hauling steel and lumber, to make the transition to the highly competitive world of deregulated trucking, Taylor said.
She and the people working with her to keep the carrier alive realized they would have to find specialty niches, Taylor said.
And when one of her customers said he needed warehouses, Bennett went into warehousing.
“So we do a lot of different things,” Taylor said, ticking off a list of divisions that includes truckload, heavy haul and a drive-away division with a large number of drivers that can drive anything that’s too large to be hauled.
“We have a bunch of pickup trucks that are leased to us for anything that needs to be pulled. We move a lot of RVs. We’re the largest transporter of manufacturer housing in the U.S.,” Taylor said.
And Bennett is a family firm, she said, talking about her two sons and her daughter who run various divisions and the four grandchildren who now work in the firm.
Ellen Voie, president of Women in Trucking, said Taylor is well deserving of her award.
“Her accomplishments as a woman in the trucking industry are many, and we are proud to recognize her,” Voie said.
Thinking about her award, Taylor said that part of what made it special is that “I admired the other women that had been nominated. It will be a highlight for me of my career.”
This is the fourth year WIT has honored a woman for contributing as a role model and pioneer in advancing the success of women in the trucking industry.
Among the judges for the award was Rebecca Brewster, president of the American Transportation Research Institute who won the award last year.
The other judges were Voie and Jeff Mason, executive vice president of communications and public affairs for Transport Topics Publishing Group.
