times get hard you turn to the Lord, and that’s what I did. I walked out there on our gravel parking lot, kicking rocks and talking. I’d do that four or five times a day.” Today, Rich Logistics is as robust
as it was before the recession. But Betty Richards doesn’t take that for granted, not for a moment. “I try to give back,” she said while
sitting in front of an expansive picture window in her Little Rock home that overlooks the Arkansas River valley, across a back yard filled with bird feed- ers that are rarely unattended on an early fall day. “We’ve been very blessed at our company.” Based in Little Rock, Rich Logistics
today employs about 400 people and owns nearly 300 trucks and 1,200 trail-
“He just liked the big trucks and
working on them, I guess,” Richards said, smiling when asked what pos- sessed her husband to do that. “He never drove them much. He just liked fooling with them.” In fact, D.W. was so intent on
working on his trucks that “we’d have trouble getting him to let them go out on a freight run,” she recalled. “He’d follow them out the driveway hollering, ‘You can’t take that truck and trailer now!’” And in the fine tradition of many
spouses of big rig owners, Betty wound up in the business, by default. An employee by marriage, if you will. “Yeah, that’s how I got there,” she
laughed. “I didn’t start out meaning to be there.”
that all the time,” she said. “Trucking can be tough, but I feel like we have a really nice office and some really good employees.” No one ever told her to her face
that a woman couldn’t succeed in the trucking industry, though, and that’s probably a good thing for them, as she’s continued to lead Rich Logistics to suc- cess and recognition in the industry well beyond the borders of Arkansas. But the work that went into assuring that the company simply kept existing during those dark years of the Great Recession is never far from Richards’ thoughts. “We got through that, and the
vendors worked with us,” Richards recalled with a still-audible sense of relief. “Then those nine weeks started,
“WE DIDN’T LAY ANYBODY OFF. I JUST GOT OUT THERE AND KICKED ROCKS AND TALKED TO JESUS EVERY DAY.”
—BETTY RICHARDS, OWNER, RICH LOGISTICS
ers. They do a lot of “drop-and-hook” business and both rent and lease trail- ers. In addition to the Little Rock home office, they have offices in Alexander, Ind., and Burton, Mich., terminals in Laredo, Irving, El Paso, and Brownsville in Texas, and have “a new opportunity” starting in January with Ford Motor Company. “We’re an over-the-road long haul
carrier, and we mainly go up through the Midwest from Mexico to Canada,” said Richards, “We haul auto parts, pretty much exclusively. Just about everything that puts the car together – engines and hoods and just all of it.” Rich Logistics was incorporated in
1988, but it had begun a year before that when D.W. Richards sold his Honda auto and motorcycle dealerships and bought a 1984 Mack and then a 1985 Peterbilt.
24 While the company was small, her
major role was signing payroll checks and doing billing, plus handling the set- tlements “when Jay the settlement guy went on vacation.” It was 1990 before she really felt ingrained in the company. That’s when they built a plaza in Bryant and moved their offices there. In 1993 they purchased another piece of proper- ty on Interstate 30, and in 1998, moved to Scott Hamilton Drive and 65th Street in southwest Little Rock. “That’s when things really started
growing for us,” she said. After D.W. passed away, Betty
Richards found herself at the helm of the company – a woman in what was still very much an Old Boys Club. And she knew, even though she’d been work- ing at Rich Logistics for a decade, she’d still have to prove herself. “Oh, yeah, I feel you have to do
I believe in May 2008, when [General Motors] actually shut down. And every time you got through a week, you’d say, ‘Eight more weeks to go, seven more weeks to go.’” How bad did it get? Well, unnerved
by the talk of GM’s bankruptcy and the fact Rich Logistics was so dependent upon the auto industry, Richards’ bank told her late in 2008 that she needed to find another lender. That was a real trial, said Richards, since other banks were having it just as tough, but they found one early the next year. “It wasn’t a perfect deal, but we
were still there,” she said. “And so many shut down at that time, so we’re very blessed to still be here. That’s my bot- tom line.” Three thoughts kept echoing in
Richards’ mind during the toughest times and helped her keep going: She
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