I have known Jerry Murphy for almost two years. We talk every couple of weeks. And I can tell you there is no version of him for the cameras. The man you hear on this episode is the same man I get on those calls.
He did not have a driver’s license when he started his trucking company. It was suspended, for reasons connected to the drinking that had already cost him most of a career. He had a felony. He had no clear path and no template. What he had was a Google search for how to get a DOT number and a father willing to haul cars on the weekends with him.
Watch the full episode: Jerry Murphy sits down with me on The Long Haul to walk through the ten-year grind behind an acquisition that looked overnight to everyone but him.
That was 2017. This summer, Jerry sat at a table with his wife and signed the papers to buy a trucking company that had been running for four decades, adding roughly 25 trucks and 140 drop trailers to the operation he built himself. He celebrated for one evening. Lunch, then the couch, then back to work the next morning.
I had been asking him to tell this story for a long time. He finally said yes. What follows is what he told me, and I think it is the most important conversation I have had on this show.
The Kid Who Drove a Semi at 14
Jerry grew up in Washington County in southern Ohio, a self-described country boy with great parents and no money. He says he never knew he was poor. His parents made sure of that.
His father worked industrial hydro blast and vacuum truck work, the environmental side of heavy industry, and Jerry calls it a huge industry that nobody sees. Every uncle on both sides of the family did the same work, and Jerry was a shop boy for his father in the summers.
That is where he drove his first big truck, at 14. His father made him an offer: back it into the company lot without breaking a gear, and the two of them would trade paychecks. He learned on twin stick. Out in the country, if you wanted to see your friends, you rode, so it was dirt bikes and four wheelers first, then Harley Davidsons.
After high school, college was not for him, so he followed his father into the business and rose fast. He had been around the equipment his whole life and he was not scared of the hours, having watched his father work 80 and 90 hours a week. He climbed from the field to supervision to project management, and he was, by his own account, very good at it because he put everything into it.
He also stepped into the lifestyle that came with it. Work hard, party hard, play hard. Trade work, out of town, 12 and 14 hour days, then the bar all night.
“You Don’t Get to Decide When That Flips”
Jerry is an open book about what happened next, and he says it plainly: he is a recovering alcoholic.
He describes the progression with a line that stuck with me the first time I heard it. He was working full time to drink part time. And then, before he knew it, he was working part time to drink full time.
“You don’t get to decide when that flips,” he told me. “You’re just having a good time until you’re not.”
He was young, easily influenced, and, he says, deeply insecure, using the drinking to mask it.
Then came the wreck. Jerry had been drinking and should not have been behind the wheel. A good friend offered him a ride home. Jerry told him he was going to grab something out of his truck. He climbed into it instead and took off. He does not remember any of it.
The truck went left of center, off the road, and hit a telephone pole hard enough to push the control arms back underneath the cab of a crew cab diesel pickup. It hit on the passenger side. Jerry says that is likely the only reason he is alive. It knocked him out and split his head open. The deputy sheriff who found him was a friend from high school. Jerry woke up in the hospital.
“Murphy, we thought you were gone,” his friend told him.
The career did not survive it. Jerry says his name in the business was good enough that other people gave him chances, and he went to three different companies. They all ended the same way. He burned the bridges himself, and he does not dress it up. “It wasn’t their fault,” he said. “It was my fault. I just couldn’t get my stuff straight.”
The Conversation With His Daughters
There was no program. No countdown. No court-ordered rehabilitation that took. Jerry had been through all of that, and none of it worked, because he did not want to get sober.
What worked was a look on two faces.
He had started his company by then and was working late in his shop, drinking while he worked on his truck. On the way home he got pulled over and charged with a DUI. He went to jail and got bailed out the next day.
His twin daughters were nearly 13. They knew he had been in trouble before, but they were finally old enough for him to have the conversation directly, and Jerry decided they deserved to hear it from him. He pulled them aside and told them what he had done.
“They just had an overwhelming look of disappointment on their face,” he said. He still gets emotional talking about it.
He never drank again after that day. He is quick to say it was not easy and will not pretend otherwise. He had to learn to cope, and everything else that comes with sobriety came after. But the decision itself was made in that room. His sobriety date is August 26. His wife, the woman who put up with all of it, is still with him.
I understand this part of his story better than most. In March of 2022 I made the same decision for myself. I used to pick hotels based on the bar in the lobby, and I did not see it for what it was at the time either. Nobody wants to.
Once he got sober, Jerry says, he started finding all the other reasons. That is the part he wants people to understand about addiction: how selfish it makes you, and how completely it convinces you that you are the only one it is hurting.
“Even if you’re just the guy that’s having some beers with his friends every night,” he said, “there’s people at home that would probably rather have you at home.”
Building It Without a License
Sober and starting over, Jerry went looking for something to build.
He had left environmental work when he burned the last bridge, moved to Arizona, and gone to the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute to become a Harley technician. He loved the job, but in Ohio the work is seasonal, and he did not want a seasonal job for the rest of his life. So he came back to environmental work while he figured it out.
Then a friend mentioned he was hauling cars on the weekends and making decent money. Jerry told his dad, and his dad said he would do it with him. Jerry calls himself a research junkie. He googled how to get a DOT number and did the whole thing himself, without a clear path and without a license to his name.
They hauled cars on weekends from 2017 to 2019. In 2019 he went full time, bought a semi, and got on a local contract running power only. August of that year, he got sober.
He built the company on the power only model, hauling for a big retail store, and he is candid that the appeal was that it let him grow without doing much selling. At one point he had five trucks on that single account.
Then the retailer shut its doors.
Jerry had diversified a little, luckily, right before it happened. But it was tight. There were weeks he could not make payroll, when his account went negative the moment payroll came out. He nearly went out of business after COVID as well. His lesson from it is the oldest one in the business, and he says it without flinching: do not put all your eggs in one basket.
The Load That Explains the Whole Business
I pushed him on something that has always stood out to me about his operation. Jerry is an introvert, and I say that with sincerity because he is my guy. Yet six months ago his trucks were not on the spot market at all. Everything was relationship-based contract freight, with spot used only for backhauls. I wanted to know how an introvert with a handful of trucks pulls that off.
His answer went back to sobriety, not sales.
“That goes back to being the person that you say you’re going to be,” he said. When he was drinking, he would tell someone he would be there and then not show up. He was not dependable. “You can’t carry that into business.”
He tells a story that gets the point across better than any pitch. One of his customers called him in a pinch, needing help with two loads heading north. Jerry does not drive much anymore, but he took one himself and one of the customer’s own drivers took the other. He offered to run up together. The driver passed.
The next morning the customer called Jerry to ask whether the contact at delivery had arrived. Jerry said he was 20 minutes early and around the corner, and surely the customer’s own driver was already there.
“No, Murphy,” the customer told him. “My drivers aren’t like your drivers. You’re going to be there first.”
Jerry delivered the load, put all his straps away, and was pulling out of the facility as the other driver was pulling in.
“You have to be the most dependable person out there, no matter what,” he said. “That’s what’s worked for me.”
His drivers tell him the same thing. When Jerry says something, it is the gospel. His customers know it too. That reputation is what put an acquisition on the table years later, and Jerry knows exactly why.
“Hard work and honesty will get you further in any business,” he said.
The Squeeze Nobody Warns You About
Before the acquisition, Jerry hit the wall that catches most small carriers, and his description of it is one of the most useful things in the entire conversation. I know it because I lived it too.
“When you’re a small trucking company, it’s not bad. You got three or four trucks, you’re doing all right,” he said. “You approach five, six, seven trucks, it gets tough, because you got some big bills but you don’t have the revenue the big companies have.”
He was putting less money in his pocket at six and seven trucks than he had at three and four. There is a point, he said, where you either scale back or you scale up fast.
Then the phone rang.
A gentleman called wanting to know if Jerry would come run his company. Jerry told him he was not in the business of growing somebody else’s company, he was trying to grow his own. Then he asked, half joking, whether the man wanted to sell it.
“Well, actually, I do,” the man said. “That’s why I’m calling.”
The company was 40 years old with a spotless safety rating, beautifully run, sitting in Jerry’s own backyard. Some of its drivers had been there 40 years. The deal took about a year, on and off, with stretches where Jerry was certain it would not happen. When it closed, he added roughly 25 trucks and 140 drop trailers, putting him at better than a four to one trailer to truck ratio and a fleet approaching 40 units.
When the office team at the acquired company learned it was selling, one of them cried. She was scared of the new guy before she ever met him. She did not know the new guy I knew. She is now, by Jerry’s account, one of his biggest assets, and one of his first moves was taking better care of the people who came with the company.
“We’re not a trucking company, we’re a people company,” Jerry said. “We just happen to use trucks to move freight. Trucking is trucking. All these companies are doing the same thing, we’re all moving freight. The way you take care of your people, that’s what matters.”
“Joe, Do You Think I Can Do It?”
The other half of the acquisition story happened in a banker’s office, and it is the part I point to when people ask how a guy with six trucks and a record ends up buying a 40-year-old carrier.
“I ain’t got much, but I take care of my credit.” Jerry said that to me long before any of this happened, and he meant it. The banker who financed his first truck financed every truck after it. His name is Joe. He watched Jerry grow, watched him pitch schemes and told him to think about them, and watched Jerry call once to ask if something could be done with the payments because he could not make payroll. And he watched Jerry do all the right things anyway.
When Jerry came to him about buying the company, they talked it through more than once. Joe told him he would give him the money.
“Joe, do you think I can do it?” Jerry asked him.
“If I didn’t think you could do it,” Joe said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Jerry says Joe does not know what that meant to him. “The people that have been watching you from behind the scenes have faith in you because of the decisions you made and the way you changed your life,” he said. “When I say your word matters, your word matters.”
He walked into a local bank and asked for seven figures. The banker said no problem. That is what a decade of small, unglamorous, unwatched decisions buys. Nobody sees your credit score move a point or two. You only get the major alerts. But it is happening the whole time, and one day it is the reason a bank says yes.
One Night on the Couch
Jerry signed the papers with his wife beside him. They went to lunch. They spent the evening at the house on the couch. He went back to work the next morning.
I asked him why he could not give himself more than one night, after the felony, the drinking, his brother, all of it.
He does not really have an answer for it, and he admits his wife raises it with him constantly. Part of him still operates like the win is not his to enjoy, like there is a punishment still running. Part of it is simply how he is wired.
“We got to the finish line,” he said. “But it’s not a finish line. It’s a relay line. The finish line moved. Now we got to get somewhere else.”
A mechanic at a local dealership told him it seemed like the whole thing happened overnight.
“I’ve been in business ten years, man,” Jerry said. “It’s not overnight. It’s grind. People want the get rich scheme. But those are the people going on four vacations a year, spending all their weekends partying. They’re not grinding, so they don’t see you grinding behind the scenes.”
There is one more detail that says the rest of it. Jerry had wanted a particular shiny new pickup for three years. He bought the cheaper one instead, because he can work on that one himself. He is the second person I have ever called humble, and it still makes him uncomfortable when I say it.
The Brother He Carries
The hardest part of our conversation is the part Jerry did not have to share and did anyway.
Several months ago, Jerry’s brother took his own life. He had been doing the same environmental work the family had always done, and he had been living the same way Jerry once lived.
When the family was gathering pictures for the celebration of life, Jerry saw image after image of his brother sitting next to him.
“All he wanted was to be like me,” Jerry said. “And he was just like the old me.”
He sits with a question that has no clean answer. “I walked him into that life, but I couldn’t walk him out. And now he’s not here.”
He carries another one alongside it. The high school friend and deputy sheriff who pulled him out of that wrecked pickup and told him they thought he was gone is also no longer living. He took his own life too.
“I sometimes wonder why my life was spared,” Jerry said. “Because I didn’t feel like my life was worth anything back then.”
It would have been easy, he said, to set his faith aside and ask God why. Instead he leaned in harder. He credits his wife with bringing him closer to it, and jiu jitsu, which he has trained for about six years, starting not long after he got sober, with giving him an outlet and a room full of people who never knew the old him. When he tells those guys the stories, they say, you did that?
“I’m telling you, totally different person back then,” he says.
His biggest fear now is not failing at business. It is not understanding what he is supposed to do with what he has been given.
“It Can Be You”
Jerry hires a lot of drivers in recovery. He talks to them about the thing that finally made it stick for him, which was not willpower or a program but disgust. He got so sick of the person he had been that no amount of money could take him back to him.
He remembers a guy at the Harley shop, another biker who had gotten sober, who told him he had once believed that being a drunk was simply who God wanted him to be. That this was all he was. And then he chose to walk away from it anyway. That stuck with Jerry, because he had believed the same thing about himself.
“I’m not supposed to be anything special. I’m not supposed to be anything,” Jerry said. “And that’s not what it is. Anybody can change.”
A friend from jiu jitsu who runs a commercial tire business pulled him aside at the new shop and talked for an hour, telling Jerry he had been talking to his wife the night before about how proud he was, and that he had told her, not as an insult, that Jerry is just a regular guy.
“I think when you’re that person that’s drunk and you think God doesn’t have anything in line for you because you’re a regular guy,” Jerry said, “all these people are regular guys. I was a regular guy. I am a regular guy. We’re all regular people.”
The culture he built runs on it. His drivers call him about their personal finances and about decisions that have nothing to do with freight. One of his guys grew up with a wood burner in a trailer and now puts on a car show every September to buy Thanksgiving dinners for families back home.
“These people had it in them before they met me,” Jerry said. “But God put them in my path for a reason. Somebody to take their life in their own hands and say, hey, I’m going to make a change, and they do it, and they give back? That’s a win all around.”
I asked him to speak directly to the man listening who has a record, a bottle in his hand, a loss he has not talked about, and a quiet certainty that he is disqualified. He did not hedge.
“I was all of the above,” he said.
He has heard the line a thousand times, some version of “I’m a felon, I can’t make it.” He did not have a license when he started his trucking company. He did not have money. And he says the thing that actually holds people back is neither the record nor the money.
“They want to quit because it gets hard,” he said. When you cannot make payroll, when the account goes negative, when the one customer holding up your whole operation shuts its doors, he knows exactly how easy it would have been to tell everybody he was shutting down, sell the trucks, and go drive for somebody else.
“Don’t give up. Burn the ships,” he said. “There is no plan B. Plan A is what’s going. You might have to change plan A. Plan B is quitting, and we ain’t doing that. Business is a roller coaster. Some days you’re on top, some days you’re on bottom, and you don’t always get to decide when that is.”
Here is what I told him, and I meant every word of it. I am proud of him, because I know the journey. A felony, a bottle, a brother he will carry for the rest of his life, two trucking companies, and a room full of people whose lives are better because he did not stay down.
Rock bottom is not a place you visit once. Sometimes it has a basement. But if a kid from nothing in Circleville, Ohio, can climb out twice and buy the company everybody thought he could not, you are not disqualified either.
You do not need more motivation. You need structure, you need people, and you need to stop letting humble steal your happiness.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day. Call or text 988.
The post August 2019: Two Trucks and a Fresh Start. Today: Nearly 40 Trucks, 140 Trailers, and a 40-Year-Old Carrier. appeared first on FreightWaves.
