On the morning of her first day of work, Tana Greene, then 16 years old, woke up, made breakfast for herself and her husband, fed her baby, showered and put curlers in her hair, did her makeup, and walked into the hallway of their home.
There, her husband, Larry, stood aiming a shotgun at her face. “Go ahead,” she remembers him saying. “Walk out the door.” Greene crumpled to the floor, and raised her hands protectively above her head. She saw rage in his eyes, but oddly, he was also laughing.
“I think his idea was ‘If I give her enough fear, she’s going to behave at work,’ “ Greene says. “After about 30 minutes of that, he let me go.”
As she recalls the ordeal, which happened in 1975, Greene, dressed in a white cashmere
knee-length vest, black leather pants, and stiletto boots, is poised and smiling, and her eyes are sparkling. She is youthful for both her age, 58, and for what she has endured. It’s hard to believe she was ever that cowering teenager–”a shadow,” as an old friend of her ex-husband remembers her.
Even Tana Greene doesn’t recognize much about that girl anymore. She is now a serial entrepreneur: She’s the co-founder and CEO of two North Carolina-based national staffing companies that, together, are on target to hit $80 million in revenue this year. Greene’s success has brought her a lifestyle that she couldn’t have imagined in her younger years. She and her second husband, Mike Greene, live in a palatial, country club home on Lake Norman, just north of Charlotte. She and Mike hobnob with the local moneyed set.
Most recently, she founded Blue Bloodhound, a startup that has raised roughly $9 million in venture funding from investors including Oscar Salazar, the former CTO of Uber; Curtis Arledge, the former CEO of BNY Mellon’s investment management and markets group; and John McCabe, the retired head of global operations at PayPal. The company aims to transform how hiring works in one of the most heavily regulated, conservative, and good ol’ boy industries in the United States–trucking.
Greene’s willingness to wade into this notoriously tough, male-dominated industry is testament to just how far she’s come from her teenage self. And powering nearly every step she’s taken away from the terrifying lost years of her youth has been a dream–to build something no one can ever take away.
Those first years were a struggle, especially winning new business. Turning a profit felt nearly impossible. The Greenes went two years without drawing a salary. After they won their first big piece of business–a contract to staff 375 laborers, fire-watch personnel, pipe fitters, and welders at a Norfolk shipyard–they realized they didn’t have enough cash to make the hires.
They believed that bootstrapping their business was the way to go–”We’d been raised to think you don’t borrow a dime from anybody,” Tana says–but they had spent all their savings. They had to get a loan secured against receivables to pay the new staff.
The interest payments plus the franchise fee wiped out any margin they’d included in their aggressive bid. She and Mike learned one hard business lesson after another.
By 2015, the combined companies had annual revenue of $49.9 million, more than double their 2012 sales. In 2016, sales increased again, to $65 million. Strataforce and Road Dog together have 81 full-time employees, with 11 offices placing drivers in 14 states and 10,000 temporary workers.
The trucking industry is filled with inefficiencies. The Blue Bloodhound app seeks to streamline the process of hiring qualified drivers, to reduce regulatory paperwork, and to maximize driver job stability.
This spring, Greene decided she had to jump-start the business. In March, she hired a new vice president of technology to overhaul the platform. In May, she laid off seven of the company’s 30 employees, including the head of marketing and the customer service staff. To win the confidence of the motor carriers, Greene asked the FMCSA to develop a special certification for Blue Bloodhound. She is also seeking the imprimatur of industry influencers and planning to acquire professional liability insurance.
She’s not giving up on Blue Bloodhound–far from it. She’s just going slow, not recruiting new drivers while the company reworks an app to fit the needs of motor carriers, drivers, and regulators. She compares it to her earliest days in the staffing business, when she and Mike had to figure out the nuts and bolts of cash flow after the shipyard contract.
“But I wouldn’t have gotten to the place I am, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate what I’m tolerating now, if I hadn’t gotten self-assurance from all those past struggles,” says Greene. “It’s almost like all those things that have happened in my life have brought me to this place.”
This abdriged story was culled from inc.om
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