Business View - January 2015 89
years he spent on the less-than truckload side of the
industry, and the initial (and ultimately unsuccessful)
search he made at that point for companies available
for purchase. When no suitable operation was found,
he began his own endeavor by buying a truck and em-
ploying a single driver. And once he was in, the forever
forward mindset took over.
The one-truck/one-driver operation became two trucks
and then four trucks and then eight trucks within the
first couple years, though Church still supplemented
the new endeavor with a part-time night job as a driver
with a handicapped bus service in Birmingham. Once
the day job got to a point where a full-time dispatcher
was needed, though, he’d reached a milestone of suc-
cess.
“I stepped out and just concentrated on trucking,” he
said.
“We just grew it. We had to go out and find more cus-
tomers. When you get so far invested in it, you can’t
turn backward. You’ve just got to keep pushing for-
ward. What wasn’t profitable, we found a way to make
it profitable or we quit doing it. I put every bit of my
personal savings into this thing. I just couldn’t back
up. Failure was not an option.”
The choppy early years ultimately yielded a sustain-
able operation that now supports a workforce of nearly
90 employees – including 10 new hires in 2014. The
business had amassed 50 trucks by the end of 2012,
then boosted the asset collection to 74 trucks last year
with the formation of a dump-truck operation through
a partnership with Mid-South Paving, in which three
drivers were also brought on.
The company’s core function is still dry-van operation
and its service reach extends across the United States,
though Gene Sweeney, Church’s vice president of op-
erations since 2005, said an effort has been made
in the last 18 months to close territorial focus to the
eastern half of the country.
The customer base remains dotted with Birmingham-
area clients who, in Church’s words, “know who we
LOGISTICS
