Female Founders
BY EDDY GOLDBERG
AHEAD OF HER TIME
M
And beyond her wildest dreams
ary Ellen Sheets, founder of
Two Men and a Truck, says
she’s done every job in the
company but drive a truck. Retired now
at 76 from a remarkable career in business,
and spending the winter in warm, sunny
Florida, she’s not done yet with being
remarkable: she plans to buy a miniature
tugboat this summer when she returns
home to Michigan, where the company
began 30 years ago.
It would be fair to say she’s led an interesting—and pioneering—life. How
many women do you know who founded
a moving company starting with one $350
“beater” truck that grew to become a $400
million company with 27 international locations? Or who’d spent the preceding 20
years as a self-professed “computer nerd”
during an era when computers were as
big as trucks and PCs were nonexistent?
“It was very unusual,” she acknowledges,
for a woman to be involved in computing at the time. It began with a job at a
wholesale grocery company where, with
no background in computing, she taught
herself COBOL and Fortran—mainframe
computer programming languages from
the stone age of computing.
“When I look back, that was pretty
amazing,” says Sheets today. Working for
the State of Michigan for two decades,
she began as a programmer and became
NAME: Mary Ellen Sheets
TITLE: Founder
COMPANY: Two Men and a Truck
SYSTEM-WIDE REVENUE: $405 million
in 2015
NO. OF UNITS: 370 (2 corporate)
INTERNATIONAL UNITS: 27
GROWTH PLANS: 14 percent growth; we
grew on average 17 percent the 5 previous
years with 60 months of consecutive record
growth
PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? Private
YEAR COMPANY FOUNDED: 1985
YEAR STARTED FRANCHISING: 1989
YOUR YEARS IN FRANCHISING: 27
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