Woman Of The Year Nominee: In For The Long Haul

Transport magnate keeps the business family oriented.

by Charles Molineaux

September 5, 2008

C all her a matriarch and Marcia Taylor will object. Then she’ll acknowledge you’re probably right.

“Well, I don’t see myself that way,” she starts out. “But maybe, unintentionally, I’ve become that. I’m the head of the family, certainly. I am the owner and CEO of the company. If that describes me, then I guess that’s who I am.”

    
As owner and leader of Bennett International Group – the largest female-owned business in the state – Taylor keeps family as a pervasive theme, and if “matriarch” may sound harsh and imperious, perhaps “mom” might be more appropriate. That’s a name some employees apply to her, because it’s literally true. Four generations of her family have worked at the company in key leadership positions, including her mother, her children and, now, her grandchildren.
    
“It truly is a family for us,” Taylor laughs. “Actually Bennett is made up of a lot of families. We have mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, fathers and daughters. I care a lot about people, and I care a lot about the employees that work for us. That’s pretty much my style.”
 
Today, Bennett is a highly diversified transportation and logistics enterprise with subsidiaries in trucking, heavy-haul freight, drive-away vehicle transport and delivery, port services, warehousing and even insurance. It posts revenues of $225 million, with some 3,000 employees. But it’s been a family business since Taylor and her husband G.D. Garrison bought what was then a small trucking company in 1974.

That sense of family, she recalls, became painfully urgent when G.D. died suddenly in 1981. “ It was a very scary time. I had no money. The only thing I had was this company in order to provide for myself and for my children. But I knew the business, and we had employees who had already worked for us for some time. We just all got together and said, ‘I think we can do this.’”

Right off, she faced the challenge of keeping the company’s hard-won clients … in an era in which hardly any women were operating trucking businesses. “We had contracts with customers,” she recalls, “and weren’t sure whether they would feel comfortable with a female running the company. But everybody was very good about that and took a ‘let’s wait and see’ attitude. And we never really missed a step.”
    
Almost simultaneously another challenge came from larger scale market forces – deregulation. The early 1980s tide of deregulation was sweeping up weaker competitors in the trucking industry. To survive, Marcia Taylor decided broader was better.
    
“Yes, diversifying was a conscious decision,” she says. “It seemed like most trucking companies were doing pretty much the same thing. I felt that if we were going to stay in business, we were going to have to find some niches for ourselves. We needed not to put all of our business with one segment.”
    
It’s a strategy Taylor sees paying dividends for Bennett’s now seven different companies, right up to our current unsteady economic times, times whose volatility she knows acutely. Trucking, she observes, often suffers first when business slows down and sees the fruits of a recovery first when it picks back up. “September will be our 35th year in business and, over the years, it seems as though when one segment or industry is a little depressed, we’ve always been fortunate that another of our companies or another segment of the industry seems to be picking up.”

Sure enough, while Bennett takes hits in its new truck, drive-away, RV and manufactured housing divisions, Taylor points elsewhere with relief. “Our businesses tied to energy are doing well. We’re heavy into agriculture. That’s tied to energy because of corn and soybean production. Our general commodities and heavy haul are staying strong, too.”

And for Taylor, success means sticking to her values. “We have a values system at Bennett that we try to honor and make our decisions by,” she stresses. “Certainly you have to make a profit, but it’s not always about the bottom line for me. It’s more about doing a great job for our customer and trying to take care of our employees. It’s much easier for us to have that kind of attitude, and a family culture, because we are privately owned. Though we are a fairly large company, we are privately owned.”
    
Not that her approach is for everyone. “For someone who comes from a different environment, it’s difficult,” Taylor admits. “We go that extra mile. We like keeping in mind that we are going to take care of our employees. Someone coming from a culture that is very, very driven by the bottom line regardless of the consequences is probably not going to like it.”
    
Taylor says it all comes naturally for her closest corporate officers. The president of Bennett Motor Express, the commodities heavy-haul and brokerage arm, is her oldest son, David Lowry. Her middle son, Danny Lowry, is in charge of manufactured housing, RVs, distribution and warehousing.

Which makes for interesting dinner conversations.
 
“I don’t know if they all think it’s wonderful or not,” she says, laughing. “We try to have a family meeting at least once every quarter. We try to recommit. I think it’s been a very positive experience.” 
    
It’s an experience she intends to continue, and keep in the family. Two of her grandchildren have worked for Bennett (although one has now headed back to college).
    
“Our hope,” she predicts, “is that we can pass this on to the next generation. We are just working toward that.”