Pictured above: Vicki Stephens (Photo by Dwain Hebda)
In 1966, Vicki (Jones) Stephens stunned her father, C.C. Jones, with the announcement that she was not going to college. Her father, founder of C.C. Jones Trucking in North Little Rock, responded to his headstrong daughter by playing hardball.
“When I graduated from high school, my dad had it all mapped out,” she said. “He’d given me a 1966 Mustang for going off to college, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to marry my childhood sweetheart. In order to keep me from doing that, he said, ‘OK, then you go get a job, and you’re going to pay for half of this car.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s what I’ll do.’”
In a show of determination that would become a hallmark of her career, Stephens marched down to Southwestern Bell, interviewed for and landed a job, then came back to inform her father and ask for half the car note.
“He just looked at me in shock and said, ‘Well, I really need some help with my bookkeeping department. Would you consider coming to work for me?’” she said. “I said, ‘Sure.’ It didn’t matter to me. I just needed a job because I now had to pay for a car.”
At that, she let out a knowing chuckle.
“The cost of that car was my future,” she said.
So began the official tenure of one of Arkansas’ pioneering women in trucking, although unofficially, it began almost from the moment she was born.
“My father owned and drove a truck when I was born, and I was an only child for five years,” she said. “Mother and I would sometimes go with him on the truck. I guess maybe that’s when I got hooked was at a very early age.”
As evidenced by the spat over college, there were plenty of opportunities for Stephens to have chosen another route in life, especially given the attitude of the trucking industry toward women in roles of authority — an attitude, it should be said, that was shared in some ways by her father.
“My dad was a Great Depression baby. He always thought women had their place, and my place was not sitting at the dispatch table,” she said. “It was sitting back in the bookkeeping department, where I was overseeing the money and making sure that the money was coming in.
“This all rocked along, and I was perfectly content. I was involved in the school. I even ran for school board and served seven and a half years on the North Little Rock board of education and still worked and did everything that I needed to do and oftentimes took my kid to baseball practice and all the things that mamas tend to do. I just managed to juggle it all.”
By the mid 1980s, C.C. Jones’ partner retired, and in his place, he took on his daughter and Buddy Eubanks, the company dispatcher, as business partners. Things went along fine until one day, an off-the-cuff remark changed the course of Stephens’ life.
“My dad was one of a kind. One day, he popped off to me, and he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. If you and Buddy can pay me off in four years, I’ll just retire,’” she said. “I just grinned. Four years to the day [in 1990], I threw him a retirement party. I always said you throw me a challenge, and I will attempt to meet it.”
Stephens was now in very select territory because a woman owning a trucking company was all but unheard of in Arkansas at that time. She threw herself into the role to build upon the foundation her father had created.
“When it came down to the opportunity to own part of this business and my dad asked me to do it, to me, that was the ultimate compliment. I said, ‘Of course. That’s exactly what I want to do,’” she said. “Buddy and I set out to continue to keep the business going, and we worked seven days a week. We would swap weekends, and I would do a little dispatching. I just ventured out and started doing new and different things other than billing.”
More than once, Stephens’ strength would be tested by men, both in her professional life and privately. After 29 years, her marriage ended, and around that time, Eubanks sent her legal papers to dissolve the company her father had built due to a loggerhead they reached over his asking price for her to buy him out.
“Going through a divorce was pretty stressful and was pretty expensive,” she said. “The business part was different. [Buddy] told me once when I went in there, ‘It’s not personal. It’s business.’ I went, ‘It’s very personal.’”
Stephens not only prevailed in the transaction, buying Eubanks out at a price to her liking, but she brought her son, Gabe, on board as a partner. This brought the company under sole ownership by the family, and the two have run the company with great aplomb ever since.
“Gabe grew up down here around the office, back in the shop. He grew up around trucks. He said he can remember walking underneath them. He grew up here on East Broadway around the business,” she said. “Now he’s the third generation that owns this company. He is so much like his granddad in the love that he has for it. He wears many hats, and I could not have ever made it through this stage of the game without him.”
In addition to her ownership of the company, Stephens also blazed new trails in leadership roles through the Arkansas Trucking Association, joining the board of directors, where she was nominated to be the body’s chairman in 2003, the first woman in the group’s 70-plus-year history to do so. She served two terms as chair, displaying a deft touch with the male egos in the room.
“After meetings, we’d go have dinner, and then maybe it would be time to go have a cigar and a drink,” she said. “Well, I might swing by and have a little drink with them, but then I’d leave. I just had enough sense to know that they needed their time and their space to do the male things, and I didn’t need to be interfering with that, so I think I had a little bit of common sense. I think from that, I gained their respect, and they would listen to me.”
One major battle Stephens won during her tenure came in the early 2000s, when a proposal was floated to charge sales tax retroactively on equipment held by Arkansas trucking companies that had not been licensed in the state. Once again, Stephens found a fight that was as personal as it was professional.
“That was going to put a lot of small trucking companies like mine out of business,” she said, “so I had to stand before those people in a board meeting and explain to them the situation that was going to happen to a large segment of the membership of the Arkansas Trucking Association.
“There were a couple that didn’t really care, but there were two in particular that really did care, and they made the motion, and they seconded it, and it passed to fight it. We set about fighting that, and by the time we got to that stage, I was the spokesperson. I could speak about it from my heart because of how it was going to affect the company that my dad had spent his life building.”
Another achievement among many she looks back on with pride was a project taken on with fellow female board member Marr Lynn Bearden to create a self-insured fund within the association to help member companies deal with the escalating cost of workers’ comp insurance. The program returns dividends to stakeholders in years when money is left over after paying claims, so it has not only reduced costs it has also driven better safety management by participating companies.
“I do believe that Marr Lynn and I played a huge role in making change in the industry because today when you look at the board of trustees for the workers’ comp fund, there are three new women who sit on that board,” she said.
In and amongst the association work, Stephens and her son have sustained the family business through good times and lean. The company hauls perishable food, running 18 trucks and 25 trailers.
“We have a special little niche that has worked out really well for the family,” she said. “We basically haul poultry and products out of Arkansas to California and from California back into Arkansas, Tennessee and this area. We’ve basically done the same route and the same product forever, and we’ve been pretty successful at that.
“The industry has been really good for us because people are going to eat, regardless. Even during [the COVID-19 pandemic], when it was a little slow with schools that were shut down and restaurants that were shut down, we were still able to keep all of our drivers working that needed to work. We were able to get through that fine.”
As she approaches 60 years with the family firm, health issues have caused her to curtail some of her extracurricular activities. Yet Stephens still reports to the office regularly, where she greets drivers, mechanics and shop workers in a tone closer to den mother than boss, which is just how she likes it.
“We’ve made some changes. For instance, we don’t deadhead [pull empty trailers] like we used to,” she said. “We used to take the load and deliver it, come back to the yard. Now when they leave here and go to California, there’s going to be a load waiting for them in California so they can bring it back here.
“In a lot of other ways, we just do it the same way we’ve done it for all these years. We’re a small company. We’re family oriented. We still basically hire everybody out of Arkansas, and we know so much about our employees and their families. Gabe schedules trip loads around their schedules when possible in order for them to have a family life and family time at home.”
Of all the accomplishments she has enjoyed, longevity might be the sweetest plum of all. Looking around the industry, Stephens can see many more women who have ascended to positions of leadership and authority at trucking companies large and small. She is proud to still be standing among them.
“I like to think that I have my father’s work ethic. He had a difficult childhood, a difficult life, but he worked hard, and he succeeded,” she said. “I truly believe, if people have the desire and the will, that things will work. As a woman, I’ve always been a minority in this industry, but that doesn’t matter. Sometimes it may be a disadvantage, but if you want it bad enough and you put forth the effort and you keep on, the odds of you succeeding are much greater than if you give up.
“Me, I’m just pretty stubborn, pretty bullheaded. If I fall flat on my face, I just pick myself up and brush myself off and go on.”
VICKI STEPHENS ON PERSEVERANCE
First of all, don’t give up. It’s just a setback, and it may be a setback for all the right reasons. Maybe it’s not what would have been best for you. We’re human. We make mistakes and things happen, but you learn from your mistakes. You learn from your failures. It’ll be OK as long as you don’t give up and you just keep on going.
VICKI STEPHENS ON LEADERSHIP
I know that I don’t have all the answers to all the problems. I surround myself with people who are a lot smarter than I am, and I allow them to do their job. I just try to lead by example. I just ask them to put forth the effort as if [the company] was theirs, and they do, and it all works.
VICKI STEPHENS ON CHARACTER
All my life, I have worked for what I thought was right. I haven’t won on every one of them. I’ve had some major setbacks in life, but you know what? As long as you know you’ve done the right thing and you can look at yourself in the mirror and you like what you see, it’s going to be OK.
VICKI STEPHENS ON LONGEVITY
The concern I have with the kids today is that they come into this world feeling they’re entitled, and they just don’t want to put forth the effort that they need to put forth. It concerns me. I’m working on my 58th year here, and I still come to work four days a week and on my day off sometimes because that’s just what I do. I like to think that I got that from my father.
VICKI STEPHENS ON ACCOUNTABILITY
There’s not really anybody I pattern myself after other than just myself and what I believe in. I have a strong feeling about what I believe is the right thing to do and how to go about it. That includes when you see something that’s wrong or that can be improved. You just don’t sit back and bitch about it, you do something about it. That’s just my personality, I guess.
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