Image: FreightWaves
Trucking & Logistics Owners: The Builders Behind Brad Jacobs, Johnelle Hunt, Andra Rush and Angelina Twardawa
Part 1 of the Trucking & Logistics Owners list: the driver who built a carrier in a recession, the refugee who dispatched from her kitchen table, the nurse who founded a trucking empire on $3,000, and the owner who rebuilt her company the night it burned down.
Produced and Edited by The Bourgeois Society Staff
Part 1 opens with the drivers who became owners: a Chicago driver who grew a 33-truck carrier through the 2009 recession, a Bosnian refugee couple who traded alternating factory shifts for a 100-truck fleet, a Mohawk founder who drove and dispatched her own trucks, and a hot-shot owner betrayed by his partner who rebuilt from a borrowed truck and a rusty trailer.
Then come the second acts — an Army veteran who went from bankruptcy to a veteran-hiring franchise empire, a towing family’s twenty-year fight for a fair contract, a widow who persuaded Kenworth to hand her the keys, a young mother with $500 in the bank who built a national fleet, the single mom whose $350 truck became America’s largest moving franchise, and the Dallas founder who lost 150 trucks and built it all back.
Selected on the obstacle climbed, the thing built, and the good given back — and fact-checked line by line, with sources linked under every profile.
The full list: Part 1 · Part 2
Founder, XPO Logistics — Greenwich, CT
Official links: Website
Image: FreightWaves
Why We’re Inspired
We’re inspired because Brad Jacobs wrote the playbook down — literally — so other owners can copy the method. His books teach the acquisition and team-building system behind eight billion-dollar companies to any founder willing to think bigger, which makes him this list’s rare billionaire who publishes his homework.
“You’ve got to think extraordinarily big from day one. Nobody achieves massive success by thinking small and hoping to become big.”
The Story
A college dropout who studied math and classical piano, Jacobs became the freight industry’s most relentless company builder: roughly 500 acquisitions and tens of billions in institutional capital raised across his career.
He turned a small expedited carrier into XPO Logistics, one of the world’s largest freight transportation providers, whose early investors made more than 50 times their money — and XPO is only one of eight billion-dollar companies he has founded, a list that includes United Rentals and United Waste. Forbes lists him as a multi-billionaire.
He now chairs QXO, the building-products distribution company he founded to run the same playbook again.
Sources
Wikipedia — Brad Jacobs (businessman)
FreightWaves Events — Brad Jacobs speaker biography
Podcast Notes — Founders: “How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Sarah Riggs Amico · Johnelle Hunt
Co-founder, J.B. Hunt Transport Services — Fayetteville, AR
Official links: Website
Image: Sage Partners
Why We’re Inspired
We’re inspired because Johnelle Hunt is the half of every founding story that rarely gets told: the partner who made payroll possible. She ran the books, the credit and the collections that kept a five-truck company alive until it became a giant — and she remains its largest individual shareholder.
“It wasn’t so much the money you gave, but in helping other people.”
The Story
A college dropout from Heber Springs, Arkansas, Hunt sold the family home and took out loans alongside her husband Johnnie to start the business — first a rice-hull packaging venture, then a trucking company with five trucks and seven trailers. For decades she worked the financial side: correspondence, statements, credit management.
J.B. Hunt grew into one of the largest transportation logistics providers in North America, and Forbes lists her as a billionaire, with roughly a fifth of the company. She outlived her husband and kept her stake and her influence.
A lifelong giver, she was named the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Arkansas Woman of Inspiration, and the University of Arkansas’s Pryor Center preserves her oral-history interview for future students.
Sources
Wikipedia — Johnelle Hunt
Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame — Johnelle Hunt
Arkansas Money & Politics — “Much to Give: For Johnelle Hunt, It’s Not the Money That Matters”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Brad Jacobs · Andra Rush
Founder, Chair & CEO, Rush Group of Companies — Wayne, MI
Official links: X
Image: TruckingInfo
Why We're Inspired
Andra Rush is a Mohawk Native American who went from nursing to an MBA to the driver’s seat of her own trucks.
She founded Rush Trucking in 1984 with one van and two pickup trucks — on $3,000 in savings, a $5,000 loan from her parents and credit cards — and in the early days she drove, dispatched and repaired the trucks herself.
As a woman in trucking she was repeatedly asked who really ran the company: her dad, her brother — or was she the wife? Her answer, given over nearly four decades, was to build one of the largest Native American-owned business groups in the country. Her philosophy is right there in how she talks about starting out.
“We just wanted a chance; not a hand-out but a hand up,”
The Story
Rush Trucking grew past 1,000 trucks at its peak, hauling automotive parts across the U.S. and Canada, and Rush built Dakkota Integrated Systems and Detroit Manufacturing Systems alongside it — companies created, in part, to bring jobs to communities that needed them, including on and near tribal reservations.
She was highlighted by President Obama in his 2014 State of the Union address as an example of job creation, sold her majority stake in Detroit Manufacturing Systems in 2018, and transferred Rush Trucking to new providers in late 2020 so she could focus on Dakkota. The van and two pickups became an empire.
She never did need anyone to believe she ran it.
Sources
ACG Detroit — Speaker Bio: Andra Rush
MichAuto — “Andra Rush” (Rush Group bio)
Michigan Manufacturers Association — “Andra Rush — 2021 MFG Woman of the Year”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Johnelle Hunt · Angelina Twardawa
Founder & CEO, Angie’s Transportation — St. Louis, MO
Official links: Website
Image: TruckingInfo / HDT
Why We're Inspired
Angelina Twardawa grew up riding with her truck-driver father, a Polish immigrant, and trucking got into her blood early. In 2012 she founded Angie’s Transportation with her brother Rafael — one truck, a whiteboard and some leased equipment.
Then, in 2017, a five-alarm fire, one of the worst in St. Louis history, leveled the business and destroyed every file the company had. She began rebuilding from her parents’ house that same night. The company recovered within three months by the Titan 100 and Marquis Who’s Who accounts — because quitting was simply never on the whiteboard.
Her leadership creed is disarmingly simple.
“I believe the most important attributes of successful leaders today are self-awareness, good communication skills and integrity,”
The Story
Today Angie’s is a certified woman-owned refrigerated and dry-goods carrier running 65 trucks and 100 trailers with about 80 employees, operating across 49 states and Canada, with revenue grown from $1 million to nearly $20 million a year.
Twardawa gives back in the same direction she came from: donations to churches, the St. Louis Food Bank, the Saint Louis Zoo and local nonprofits are part of the company’s public record. A daughter of immigrants, raised on the road, who watched her whole company burn — and started again that night.
Sources
FleetOwner — “Big-League Businesswoman: Twardawa Leading Angie’s Transportation to New Reefer Heights”
Titan 100 — “Angelina Twardawa” (St. Louis Titan 100 profile)
24-7 Press Release — “Angelina Twardawa Inducted into the Marquis Who’s Who Biographical Registry”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Andra Rush · Ben Thompson
Founder & President, HOTSHOT 107 — Zanesville, OH
Official links: Website · LinkedIn
Image: Rolling Hype
Why We're Inspired
Ben Thompson’s story starts with a betrayal. His business partner embezzled millions, and Thompson was left with no choice but to rebuild from the ground up. So he did it the only way he knew how: he borrowed a truck, hooked up a rusty trailer, and became the first driver of his own company.
No investors’ deck, no relaunch party — just a man in Zanesville, Ohio, driving his way out of a hole somebody else dug. That is the founding story of HOTSHOT 107, and Thompson tells it without self-pity: the rebuild became the culture, family-first and driver-focused, with programs that help his drivers become fleet owners themselves.
The Story
From that borrowed truck, HOTSHOT 107 has grown into a hot-shot operation the company counts at more than 150 trucks and 70,000-plus deliveries since its 2010 founding. Thompson rebuilt it bigger than what was taken from him — and built it, this time, around the people in the trucks.
Betrayed, wiped out, and back behind the wheel: it is one of the purest comeback stories in this entire list.
Sources
Podtail — Trucking Tomorrow: “Welcome to the Trucking Tomorrow Podcast” (Thompson episode)
Listen Notes — Trucking Tomorrow (Truckbase): Ben Thompson episode listing
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Angelina Twardawa · Jerry Flanagan
Founder & CEO, JDog Brands — Berwyn, PA
Official links: Website · LinkedIn
Image: Enterprise Podcast Network
Why We're Inspired
Jerry Flanagan’s kids’ birthday-party retail chain collapsed in the Great Recession, and in 2010 he and his wife Tracy filed personal bankruptcy. In his own words, they had gone from a successful retail business to the economy crashing to filing bankruptcy in 2010.
“We literally hit rock bottom.”
The Story
What he did next is pure Army. Flanagan — whose service nickname was JDog — scrimped to buy a Jeep and a trailer, and started hauling junk with index cards, magic markers and a cell phone, while Tracy ran the back office. Customers noticed the on-time, yes-sir, clean-cut veteran way of doing things, and JDog Junk Removal & Hauling took off.
It grew into JDog Brands: nearly 300 franchises nationwide, about 90 percent veteran-owned, a system described at $100 million, headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, with a TV series, Operation Hidden Treasures, along the way.
The mission never changed: put veterans to work, with a stated goal of driving veteran unemployment below one percent, and a JDog Foundation backing veteran suicide prevention, PTSD and education programs. Rock bottom turned out to be a foundation.
Sources
Military.com — “How This Army Vet Went from Bankruptcy to Successful Entrepreneur”
1851 Franchise — “How I Franchised My Business: JDog Junk Removal & Hauling”
We Are The Mighty — “This Veteran Started a National Franchise Turning Trash into Treasure”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Ben Thompson · Joe Shoen
President & Chairman, U-Haul Holding Company — Phoenix, AZ
Official links: Website
Image: Paragon Intel
Why We’re Inspired
We’re inspired because Joe Shoen chose the business over family peace — and then spent decades proving the bet right. Anyone who has had to make that choice inside a family company will feel this one: three degrees earned along the way, and a disaster-relief policy below that shows what he thinks a company is for.
“When people are in a jam, when there’s a disaster, our heart goes out to them. We don’t want their money. We’ve got the space, so we let them have it.”
The Story
Shoen’s mother died when he was a child, and the moving company his parents founded in a garage nearly tore the family apart. Convinced his father was wrecking U-Haul, he led a shareholder coup that forced his own father into retirement and alienated most of his twelve siblings.
Then he rebuilt: the dealer network grew from roughly 4,600 locations to more than 21,000, the rental fleet reached about 204,800 trucks, and self-storage — the subject of his Harvard MBA thesis — became a second empire. Forbes estimates his net worth at about $4 billion.
When disaster strikes, U-Haul gives victims 30 days of free storage, and the company is an official American Red Cross Disaster Responder partner.
Sources
Wikipedia — Joe Shoen
My U-Haul Story — “Joe Shoen Honored as ASU Executive of the Year”
Modern Storage Media — “Sit Down with the Shoens”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Jerry Flanagan · Josh Cohen
Founder, The Junkluggers — Stamford, CT
Official links: Website · X
Image: Eco18
Why We're Inspired
Josh Cohen came home from studying abroad in Australia in 2004 with an idea he had picked up around a campfire: people would pay to have junk hauled away responsibly. He was a cash-strapped college student, so the startup kit was homemade flyers handed out door to door and his mom’s SUV — a Dodge Durango.
The first job paid $90. He quit his commercial-real-estate job, graduated from the SUV to a trailer and then to a dump truck the team nicknamed Old Rusty, and built The Junkluggers on a simple twist: donate, repurpose and recycle what you haul instead of landfilling it.
“I only earned $90 on my first job, but I knew I was on to something.”
The Story
Nearly two decades later, Cohen had grown Junkluggers from that single truck into a national franchise brand with more than 100 locations across 26 states — and then exited to Authority Brands in what Inc. called a meaningful sale. Most founders would take the off-ramp. Cohen is instead co-founding Epic Septic, betting on another unglamorous industry nobody else wants.
Serial comebacks are his brand: find the work nobody glamorizes, do it with unusual care for people, and build it into a system other owners can join.
Sources
Inc. — “Why This Founder Is Betting It All on a Boring Industry”
NetSuite — “A 21-Year-Old Built This Junk-Hauling Juggernaut by Treating People Like Gold”
1851 Franchise — “One Man’s Trash Is Josh Cohen’s Treasure”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Joe Shoen · Kari Rihm
Chairman & Dealer Principal, Rihm Family Companies (Rihm Kenworth) — South St. Paul, MN
Official links: Website
Image: Fleet Equipment Magazine
Why We're Inspired
Kari Rihm had been out of the workforce for sixteen years, raising her family, when her husband John was diagnosed with brain cancer in June 2010. He died four months later. The family business — a Kenworth truck dealership in his family since 1932 — was hers to sell or to run, and she had no dealership experience at all.
She chose to run it, and persuaded Kenworth to grant the franchise to a widow starting from zero. At her Truck Dealer of the Year acceptance, she was candid about how unprepared that moment was.
“I am here because I inherited my husband’s family business. We were not prepared for that,”
The Story
Under Rihm, the company grew from three locations to five dealerships in its first years, increased staff by more than half, and became the only 100-percent woman-owned Kenworth dealer in the United States. Her own record since then, per Family Business Magazine, runs to 15-plus locations, 350-plus employees and roughly $254 million in 2022 revenue.
She was named the Women In Trucking Association’s Influential Woman in Trucking, and in 2022 she won the American Truck Dealers’ Truck Dealer of the Year award — the first woman to take that honor.
She has made empowering women in trucking her public mission, and tells her grief-to-growth story so other widows can hear that a life is not finished.
Sources
Family Business Magazine — “Family Business CEOs to Watch: Kari Rihm”
Truck Parts & Service — “Kari Rihm of Rihm Kenworth Wins ATD Dealer of the Year”
FleetOwner — “Navistar, WIT Hail Influential Woman in Trucking”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Josh Cohen · Marcia Taylor
Owner & CEO, Bennett International Group — Atlanta, GA
Official links: Website
Image: Bennett Family of Companies
Why We're Inspired
Marcia Taylor was born to working-class parents in Southern Illinois; her father died when she was fourteen, and she grew up fast. She married young, the marriage turned unhealthy, and she found herself raising three young children on her own.
She took a job with a small Georgia trucking company — where she met her second husband — and in 1974 the couple acquired George Bennett Motor Express: fifteen trucks, thirty trailers, two contracts, and only $500 in the bank.
When her husband died unexpectedly in 1981, Taylor made the conscious decision to press on and run the company alone, a woman leading in a male-dominated industry because her family’s future depended on it.
The Story
Bennett International Group now spans a network of more than 4,500 employees, agents and owner-operators across eight divisions, from basic transportation to rigging and cranes, and it remains a family business employing her children and grandchildren.
Taylor founded the Taylor Family Foundation in 2012 to fund health care, patriotic causes, women and children in crisis, and scholarships — including a supply-chain scholarship at Clayton State University. In 2017 she received the Horatio Alger Award, the honor given to leaders who succeeded despite adversity. The $500 company became a national fleet; the widowed young mother became its matriarch.
Sources
Bennett International Group / Horatio Alger Association — “Marcia G. Taylor to Receive 2017 Horatio Alger Award”
Horatio Alger Association — “Marcia G. Taylor to Receive 2017 Horatio Alger Award”
Wikipedia — “Marcia G. Taylor”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Kari Rihm · Mary Ellen Sheets
Founder, TWO MEN AND A TRUCK — Lansing, MI
Official links: Website
Image: TWO MEN AND A TRUCK
Why We're Inspired
Mary Ellen Sheets was working as a systems analyst for the State of Michigan when her teenage sons, Brig and Jon, started moving people around Lansing with an old pickup to earn spending money. When the boys left for college, the phones kept ringing — so Sheets kept the business.
In 1985 she bought a 14-foot truck for $350 and hired two movers. That $350, the profiles all agree, is the only capital she ever personally invested in the company. She sketched the stick-figure logo herself.
A fellow panelist at a Michigan State business seminar suggested franchising, and in 1989 she awarded the first franchise — to her daughter Melanie, in Atlanta. Looking back, Sheets herself sounds a little stunned by it.
“When I look back, I can’t believe this all happened,”
The Story
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK became the first and largest franchised moving company in the United States — more than 430 franchise locations across four countries and more than ten million moves completed — before its sale to ServiceMaster Brands in 2021. Sheets became the first woman in forty years to be named the International Franchise Association’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
And the giving started immediately: she gave her entire first-year profit, $1,000, to ten charities, and built programs like Movers for Moms and Movers for Military into the brand, with franchisees collectively donating a reported $260 million to their communities. A single mother, a $350 truck, and a phone that would not stop ringing.
Sources
NewInHomes — “Mary Ellen Sheets, Founder of TWO MEN AND A TRUCK” (founder interview)
Wikipedia — “Mary Ellen Sheets”
Franchise Gator — “CEO Interview with Mary Ellen Sheets of TWO MEN AND A TRUCK”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Marcia Taylor · Mitchell Ward
Founder & CEO, MW Logistics — Dallas, TX
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram
Image: MW Logistics (official site)
Why We're Inspired
Mitchell Ward’s comeback starts with a collapse. The Dallas founder’s first trucking venture, Mitchell Ward Trucking, ended in bankruptcy proceedings — court records reported by FleetOwner show MW Logistics and its officers caught up in a lawsuit from the old company’s bankruptcy estate, settled in the early 2000s.
The Truck N’ Hustle podcast frames the scale of the fall in its episode title alone: a Texas CEO who lost 150 trucks, then built it all back.
Ward, a Texas State graduate (class of 1989) and former professional football player in the AFL, founded MW Logistics in Dallas in 2001 and rebuilt the disciplined way he now preaches on that podcast: financial discipline, debt avoidance, strategic partnerships, constant recruiting and diversifying after failure, so no single loss could ever take the whole company down again.
Accepting Texas State’s Distinguished Alumni Award, he put the credit where he believes it belongs.
“It is a great honor to receive this award. The fact that my work and impact in the community is being recognized is very meaningful to me.”
The Story
The rebuilt MW Logistics now runs freight brokerage, dedicated transportation and yard management for Fortune 500 clients across North America, and its partnership with Lazer Logistics — “MWL EV Solutions Powered by Lazer Logistics” — is billed by the company as the largest minority/women-owned EV fleet provider in the U.S. Giving back is structural: through the MW Cares Foundation, the company distributes over one million pounds of food a year to North Texas families.
Ward credits his parents and grandmother, who had him serving struggling neighbours as a child. The man who lost 150 trucks now measures success in pounds of food delivered and students mentored — a comeback with a conscience.
Sources
MW Logistics (official site) — “Leadership: Mitchell Ward, Founder & CEO”
MW Logistics (official site) — “Mitchell Ward Honored with the Texas State Distinguished Alumni Award”
Truck N’ Hustle (via Podcast App) — Mitchell Ward episode listing
Truck N’ Hustle (YouTube) — “Texas CEO Lost 150 Trucks — Then Built It All Back” (video)
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Mary Ellen Sheets · Nick Friedman