Learning Lessons From Adversity: The Path Of Resiliency With Sarah Riggs Amico
While resiliency may seem to be the decade's buzzword, it remains an important quality everyone needs. In this episode, we learn the importance not just of resilience but also of doing the right thing. Chad Burmeister starts a conversation with Sarah Riggs Amico, chairman of Jack Cooper Transportation & Logistics. Sarah remembers her childhood and what she learned that became the basis of her business and professional success. She talks about putting people first and how that has become a guiding principle for her. Tune in for more inspirational words in this episode.
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Learning Lessons From Adversity: The Path Of Resiliency With Sarah Riggs Amico
I've got a cool guest. Sarah Riggs Amico has been an executive for years. She runs a company that delivers 3.5 million cars around the country and has 2,500 employees. She also has a startup around mission-based outreach. I'm so excited to have Sarah on. Sarah, thanks for joining.
Thanks for having me.
This will be a lot of fun. You've delivered a lot more cars than most people I know. To get to know you for our audience, what I like to ask first is to rewind the tape and go back to when you're younger. Are you originally from Georgia? What were some of your early passions when you were younger? What are some of your first memories as a kid?
I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. My folks grew up in St. Louis, and I moved to the southwest corner of Missouri down the Ozarks at a small city called Joplin when I was 5 or 6 years old where I went into first grade. Some of my earliest memories, honestly, were playing softball. My dad was our softball coach for years. I started gymnastics when I was two years old, and dance when I was three. I didn't watch too much TV until after college. I was an athlete.
We spent a lot of time together as a family. My mom had been a NICU nurse before she had kids. When she had my two younger sisters and me, she left the profession to stay at home and take care of us. In a lot of ways, we had that suburban idyllic middle-income upbringing. Joplin was a small town so you couldn't get away with much. You couldn't get in trouble because your mom would know what you did before you got home.
We rode our bikes. Our neighborhood probably had two dozen kids who were my age in school. We would ride around and hang out with the friends next door. At the same time, that's not to say it wasn't an upbringing without struggle. I remember vividly one of my earliest memories was we had moved to Joplin for my dad to run a business for a wealthy family. The reason he moved us all the way down there from St. Louis is that he got to own 10% of the company. He did a phenomenal job of growing the business. He grew it so well that one of the sons in that wealthy family decided they wanted to run the business, so they fired my dad.
I remember being eleven years old sitting in the park behind the McDonald's on Main Street in Joplin and my folks telling us, “Your dad has lost his job, but we're going to be okay.” I could not possibly have imagined at that time the way I do now with my own kids and my mortgage, what it must have meant for my parents to have three kids, $200 in the bank, and a single-income family in Joplin, Missouri. Later in life, my folks told me how tight it was. They told me about the friends that helped buy groceries that week.
I also know that out of that difficult period came my dad's first opportunity to own his own business. I learned early the power of resilience, faith and family. Those are probably the earliest memories. My granddad passed away. I grew up largely back-to-back with them. Their house was the house behind ours and we had a connecting gate. My sisters and I could go back and forth all the time. I remember baking cakes and making waffles with my grandmother who was generous with the powdered sugar she put on top.
I remember talking about the Bible with my granddad. As I got a little older, watching Murder, She Wrote reruns with my grandma. My mom's parents eventually moved to Joplin as well. I remember every Friday night, even in high school, when I wasn't cheering or after the game, my friends and I would go and play Spades with my uncle and my mom's dad, my granddad on that side. It was a great way to grow up. At the same time, it wasn't always without struggle but we learned a lot about the things that help you move through those times of struggle and forward into where you want to go.
Resiliency: Growing up wasn't always without struggle, but we learned a lot about the things that help you move through those times of struggle and forward into where you want to go.
That's neat. I talked to someone on the show who had four generations living on the same street. I think of the gate between your houses talking with your grandmother, it seems to me a lot of the value of that two generations back, there's a thread of information that gets passed down. Ethics, morals, faith, and all those important things. Seeing how your grandparents act, and then you can see it in your parents, and then you bring that forward. We talked about some of the things that we can do in society today. What were some of those things that you learned early on that now carry forward in what you're doing in trying to change the world?
Hard work. Two of my grandparents had worked as custodians at different times in their life. My dad's dad worked for a while as a janitor in his elementary school. My mom's mom, who was an absolute hoot, died fairly young. She had early-onset Alzheimer's and breast cancer, but she had a good rebellious streak. I like to think I’ve got part of that from her. She cleaned hotel rooms and hospital rooms until the time that I was in high school junior high when she went more into the memory care center.
It’s respecting the dignity of work. One of my grandfathers and my uncle had a trucking company for a while. My dad has worked in the automotive and trucking industries since I was in grade school. The dignity of work was always something we were taught to value. My dad's mom, my grandma Riggs who still lives down the street from us by the way, started work when she was six years old picking cotton, and retired about four months shy of her 80th birthday as accounting and HR professional. She went back to college in her 60s and studied Accounting because she couldn't afford to go when she was younger.
The consistent thread was the dignity of working people, hard work ethic, and also a real sense of community and family, and how we treat other people. To this day, probably my favorite Bible story is the Parable of the Good Samaritan for so many reasons. You talked a lot about faith on this podcast so I feel comfortable speaking about it here and in many venues. For me, it was this idea of how we care for other people, particularly in their times of need. I volunteered since junior high, maybe middle school, whether it was shelters for people experiencing homelessness on house population.
My first internship in college was at a domestic violence shelter. When I went to business school at Harvard, I spent some time volunteering with veterans who are experiencing homelessness. When I moved to New York as a young professional, I stayed overnight in St. Bart’s church, Episcopal Church, and worked in their shelter and soup kitchen. This commitment to community and service and also understanding that we never know what's on the other side of the interaction with a person.
If somebody gives you anything less than kindness, that doesn't mean they're a bad person. It doesn't mean that they don't value you as a human. It may just mean that they had a rough morning and you caught them at the wrong time. We were always taught to be cognizant of that and to understand that the way we treat other people tells the world a lot more about what we value than anything we say.
That's amazing. There are two charities we’re supporting right now. One is FoodForOrphans.org. They've been around a long time and partnered with some big companies, and then another one called Daraja Academy in Kenya. They have 240 teenage girls. In Kenya, girls are the second choice for a family to go to school. They send the boy to school. This organization helps women in Kenya. It's so rewarding to be part of and see that. There's an event coming up on September 12th 2021 that I'm heading to in Southern California about that. I totally agree with you.
Resiliency: If somebody gives you anything less than kindness, that doesn't mean they're a bad person. It may just mean that they had a really rough morning, and you caught them at the wrong time.
We talked a little bit about challenges in life, and I like to double click on that because we all face mountains that we have to get over. Looking back, that helps us become the person that we are later in life. Is there a mountain you're comfortable sharing where at the time, it’s the worst thing that could have ever happened, and it's now okay that you got beyond it?
There are some things that are hard that you have to take with as much grace and reflection as you can. When I was in college, my best friend in childhood for many years, almost like my second mom, her mom passed away suddenly from aggressive breast cancer. She was 42 years old. In particular, I'm reflecting a lot on making the most of the time that we have. What do you want to do with the time and space that you're given in this life, on this planet and in your community? That doesn't always mean you have to do these big Nobel Prize-winning things, although those are extraordinary. Sometimes it's the ordinary moments that we undervalue, particularly in the social media era.
For me, I taught my kids to ride a bike. Believe it or not, I hadn't done that yet. For a kid who grew up riding her bike all over, that was best for me as a mom. By far, when I look back at the end of my life, one of the best days as a parent will be August 10th of 2021 when I got both kids up and riding on their bikes in the same hour period or so. Watching them go from timid and hesitant to confident and now I'm running after them, trying to keep up riding all over the neighborhood was a joy. It’s unfettered, not happiness, not contentedness, but joy deep in our soul that you only get to feel so many times.
I am reflecting a lot on that. I'm also reflecting on some of the challenges that I've had in my professional life. People are always surprised to hear partly because I look young and partly because I am young-ish, although my kids think I rode dinosaurs as a child. I've been an executive for over eighteen years. I started in media working my way out of a mailroom in Manhattan at the William Morris Agency. I have done all manner of jobs as an assistant. I worked my way up there for almost a decade in media up to being a department head and the head of strategic planning for a major media agency.
I moved into working as a professional board member and doing mergers and acquisitions, capital markets work in our family business and logistics, and we do turnaround management. It's never the same job more than a few months at a time, but it's difficult work. You're taking companies that other people have given up on and you're trying to resuscitate them. For us, because we center our values around the dignity of working people and we're proud to have a union company, we're proud to pay for healthcare. 100% of the insurance premium is for our employees and their families. We work differently. We can't do the round work that you see in movies or corporate raiders or you read about.
It's not Chainsaw Al for those of your readers who remember who that is. This is about investing in people and their well-being in the environment you create for them to work in. Trusting that if you do that and all the blocking and tackling on the business, you can turn these things around not by cutting to the bone but by investing in the well-being of the body as a whole. It's difficult work and it hasn't been without its lumps. We took our company through a pre-arranged restructuring and bankruptcy in November of 2019 over a pension issue with our union to try to save 3,000 jobs, all of the pensions, the union seniority, and all of that healthcare I talked about, and we did.
In order to get that job done, my family had to give up the equity that we had invested in the business for more than a decade. We were proud to put our money where our mouth is. We've talked a long time about how you treat the people that make your business possible and why that matters. It was as though the universe gave us a chance to show that we meant it. It was difficult to watch everything you've built for more than a decade go away, but we were fortunate that we were able to buy our business back.
Because of that restructuring that we undertook in 2019, the company was in a position to survive the COVID pandemic, where our customers, the automakers like General Motors and Ford were shut down for months in 2020. Right after they came back online, they've been beaten about the head and shoulders by the semiconductor chip shortage. It does feel like, because we did the right thing in 2019 to save the business, the jobs, and the pensions, healthcare, and our union, that we were able to survive this Groundhog Day hell loop for lack of a better expression of the pandemic.
My view has always been that failure isn't fatal, and that challenge isn't something to be avoided but embraced as the refiner’s fire. This is the place where we get distilled down into the things that we value most. It's easy to be a good winner. It's easy to do the right thing when everything is going your way. You can tell a lot more about a person's character when the chips are down or when the stuff hits the fan, and you see how they behave then.
I'm still early in my career. I'll look back and when stuff got tough, when hard decisions had to be made about whether or not we value people and community the way we say we do, that we made the right choices. Even when it wasn't easy or obvious or the most profitable path forward, we did the right things. That's a lot more of a legacy than earnings per share. For what it's worth, increasingly, you can do both at the same time.
Resiliency: You can tell a lot more about a person's character when the chips are down or when the stuff hits the fan, and you see how they behave then.
One sometimes leads to the other if you start with the right one in front. There's a Bible verse that I found and someone told this to me on the podcast. It's Malachi 3:10, “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse.” I used to think of tithe as 10% to my church. I've now discovered time, talent, treasures, which means time. It's not just money but what you're doing in your day and that there may be food in my house like you're giving 3,000 people food and everything that you did.
It says in this one translation, “Test me on this.” I've talked to a few people and they're like, “No, God doesn't ask you to test him.” He says, “Prove that this is true.” It says, “See if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will be not room enough to store it.” That's what you're sharing with our audience that you experienced that. A potentially business-crushing blow of ten years of investment, it's like, “I'm going to give all my equity in return for doing the right thing.” When you do the right thing when no one's looking, that's when God opens up the floodgates of heaven.
That's certainly been my experience. I want to be clear because you're going to have people reading this who are in the middle of the storm right now or in the bankruptcy process or out of a job. They don't know how they're going to pay their rent or buy food for their family. This doesn't make it easier for you. It is a painful, difficult soul-searching process. For those of us who feel a responsibility, whether that's to your family, parents, kids, community or employees, it is a difficult thing to feel like you can't meet that obligation for whatever reason, even if it has nothing to do with anything you did.
For the people out there who are experiencing that, I don't want to tell you it's easy. I don't want to belittle what you're feeling. I know how hard it is. I want you to know that on the other side of this, there's an opportunity that more will come to you. People in your community will step forward and help you. You will be surrounded by the friends that we all hope will move through life with. The love of your family feels for you, because of that struggle through this time, it will be deepened. It will be apparent in ways that will bless you even when times are tough. We don't take anything for granted.
I’ve got to go back to the company about six months after we bought it back and after a tough battle with COVID for me and my family. I know how lucky I am to have a job. I know how lucky I am to go back and have a chance to provide a means for other people, to provide for their family. That's the touchstone for me. If it comes down to something that's like, “Can I eke out a few more sense of profit over here? Can I do the right thing for these people who make it all possible?” It's an easy choice. If I'm being terribly honest, it wasn't as difficult as you might imagine, even in the restructuring. Knowing that you're doing the right thing comes with a different kind of peace.
I worked for FedEx right out of college and flew to Memphis. Fred Smith talked to our class back in those days. There were 25 or 30 of us. It was interesting, he said, “I don't work for FedEx. I work for FedEx five years from now.” That was a lesson on leadership. You’ve got to think ahead. You've been in the transportation business and it turns out now, one of his daughters lives in my neighborhood here in Colorado, so quite a small world.
He wrote the book that says people, service, profit and putting people first. I remember that. He led by that. One time, his company was going close to bankruptcy. There are rumors that did he go and gamble the money in Vegas to pay the employees. I've met some of those employees who kept the check and didn't cash it ever, and they framed it. He went to them and said, “I value you. I value this company. We're tight on payroll. If you wouldn't mind, don't cash this check, anyone who has the ability to do that.” He played it the other way. Many employees are like, “We get it. This is people service profit. Do the right thing.” Some of those people still have an uncashed check, which is a neat thing.
We cleared payroll during the Great Recession because remember, we move cars. We had General Motors and Chrysler. Both went through bankruptcies during the Great Recession. It's easy to forget that now. It was easy to remember it at the time because it was all over the news. We cleared payroll one week. It couldn't have been more than $8,000 or $10,000 for 1,500 employees at the time. We did it by switching banks. They didn't have direct deposit so there was extra float on the checks.
We’ve been there. There were some tough times and that was a month after we bought Jack Cooper. Our first business was smaller. It was about 120 employees in 2008. That's now grown to almost 2,500 employees. It sure wasn't a straight line nor was it a glamorous take on what being an executive is. Every day, creativity and compassion and thinking about how we solve whatever problem that is in front of us. Whether that's the Great Recession, the COVID shutdowns that we've had in our industry, protecting our employees in that environment, or how you're going to support the healthcare needs of your employees as healthcare costs were skyrocketing during the Great Recession. During that period is when we decided instead of cutting back on healthcare, we were going to pay for 100% of it. Being countercultural sometimes and having some of that, those would be my three Cs of management.
That's the rebel from your grandmother in you.
For me, it's been a great journey. It's certainly not over. I have a vision. We're going to make our company a carbon-neutral, 93-year-old trucking company, and we will be net-zero emissions hopefully by the end of this decade. By the 100th anniversary of our company in 2028, I'm going to have over half of my class A fleet, class A big rig, semi-trucks be zero-emission. We have about 1,400 of those on the road daily, whether that's fuel cell, renewable natural gas, or electric classic trucks by 2028. Doing good and doing well go hand-in-hand more often than people think. That's the legacy that you can leave when you're willing to look at the whole picture in the community and the stakeholders that are part of your business.
My son goes to the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. They announced 7 or 8 buses that are no driver, no steering wheel, and they're out there on the road taking people around. He’s so excited. He's like, “Dad, I'm going on that bus as soon as I get back to college.”
It's cool technology. I run a teamster company so I don't envision a day, at least in my lifetime, where we will ever replace the driver in the truck. Think of it more like the airlines where the planes can fly themselves, but you still want that pilot in the cockpit.
They have students that probably have a kill switch on the bus while they're driving so they can monitor everything.
It's been a turbulent period, not just in our country but in the world. I hope that this will also produce the innovation that we've seen in previous generations when you've had these difficult economic periods or geopolitical periods. I had the chance to run for office in 2018 as a nominee for lieutenant governor here in Georgia. I got to travel over the last several years to 154 of the 159 counties in our state. I met people from every walk of life, and it renews your faith in everything, people, humanity, democracy, God.
Resiliency: There are so many good people doing the right things for the right reasons in every nook and cranny of this country. At the same time, there are real and often structural barriers to opportunity that are finally now being excavated and addressed.
There are many good people doing the right things for the right reasons in every nook and cranny of this country. At the same time, there are real and often structural barriers to opportunity that are finally now being excavated and addressed. It is this critical tipping point in our culture, country, and human history. We have all of these technologies now. The question is, what are you going to do with it? What kind of world are we going to build and leave to our kids?
I've been excited about what we're doing on the business side. I ended up starting a media company chronicling some of these people doing all the right things, and in some cases, small businesses trying to survive in the pandemic. These are what I would think of as American dream stories, whether they are small business owners or entrepreneurs, whether they are immigrants and their story of how their family came to be here and why, whether that was ten generations ago or ten days ago. What we call community builders, so the people that are on the frontlines of trying to build community and eliminate barriers to the American dream.
We interviewed people like Eric Cooper, the CEO at the San Antonio Food Bank, that had 10,000 cars show up in a single day at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. We've collected over 400 interviews examining. What does the American dream even mean? How do we make sure it's accessible to everyone who's here? How do we move forward at this pivotal moment, not just our country but human history, and take all of those skills, everything we've learned, all the technology that's being developed, and move forward in a way that builds prosperity, equity and opportunity for everyone? To me, it's an exciting challenging time to be a professional.
I've enjoyed our conversation. I've had about 70 or 80 interviews on this show, and it doesn't matter where you're from or what your roots are. Everybody wants to do the best thing for the country, the world and their families. Relationship with God has gotten stronger over the last couple of years as a result of some of this.
I met the founder of Southeastern Food Bank in Orlando. He's number four in the state, and he's looking to expand internationally. He said he works for God, which I've only met two people in the show to work for God. I'm like, “I need to talk to those people because that's a cool thing to be able to say.” If we all could move our employer to God Inc., how amazing could the world become if we follow the guidance of what's been written in the Bible? With Jesus, He led the way. Have you seen The Chosen, by the way?
I haven't, with two kids, a pandemic, and two statewide campaigns in the last few years, not to mention the companies.
My favorite part is in the credits. When I sit next to my wife watching the show and they play it, it shows all these gray fish going around in a circle. Just like the rebel that you have in you, all of a sudden, one flips to blue and then another one, and then by the end of it, it's thirteen blue fishes. You're like, “My job is to turn gray fish blue.” It’s what I feel like my calling is now as a result of watching that show.
It's been definitely a time for deep spiritual reflection. Healthcare became an issue for me in the last decade or so where my whole heart is passionate. My favorite Bible story by far is the Good Samaritan, and it's such a tangible way to care for one another. My mom was a NICU nurse and my grandmother cleaned hospital rooms. The pandemic has distilled for me this need to care for people and meet those needs in a tangible, meaningful, selfless way.
It's probably one of the biggest takeaways I have had from traveling around the state and around the country for the last several years. There are many people still in this country who are sick because they're poor or poor because they got sick. The whole Good Samaritan story, people forget. Why did he tell the parable? He told it in response to someone asking him, “How do we love our neighbor as ourselves?” If the pathway to eternity with God is loving your neighbor as yourself, what does that mean? In response, Christ tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, these two men who don't share a faith. Honestly, society wouldn't even have talked to each other back in that day. Nevertheless, seeing common humanity in one another and caring for somebody in their time of need.
If we have a silver lining coming out of the pandemic, I hope it's that people internalized that lesson on everything from the grace we give to a working mom or caregiver who's struggling to healthcare needs and rights for people to issues like food security, that we have the ability to address. We need to find the political will to do the same thing. For me, that faith has permeated everything. I hope that my kids see that example rather than hearing me say it. I hope they see it, and then when it's their turn, they pick up the torch and move that forward as well.
Sarah, I've enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the show. If people want to get involved with your mission-based startup or maybe tell their story, how would they get in touch with you?
Thanks for asking. The company is called Rediscovering Our American Dreams. You can find us at OurAmericanDreams.org. We have a public platform where you can upload using your smartphone or your laptop for up to four minutes telling your own story about what the American dream means to you. We would love for you to join us. We'll be rolling out publicly the platform. It's already live. You can find it at OurAmericanDreams.org. We'll be pushing and launching that platform publicly after September or early October 2021. We would love for you to participate.
You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram, @RediscoveROAD as in Our American Dreams. Please come and upload your story. I'm @SarahRiggsAmico on Twitter and Instagram. DM me if you want to know more, and if there's anything I can tell you about how you can get involved in organizing folks to tell their story in your community. It's a great opportunity to create conversation in a space that's not polarized and not hateful. These are productive, common goal, common ground conversations that can help us rejuvenate some of those conversations that haven't been happening in our community as our political climate has become polarized.
We need more of what you're doing. My kids said, “When's the Third Party going to come out?” That's maybe what you're starting to lead the tip of the spear. It would be nice if Third Party came to town someday. With this climate, we could probably do that.
I'm not sure, but I know that conversation is something that growing up as a Midwesterner and living in the South, we are in the front porch sitting, lemonade and sweet tea drinking storytellers. Every good thing that can come in this life starts with that human connection. Remember that even when we don't see the world the same way, we can find some things that we can still converse about, be productive together and hopefully, build a legacy our kids can be proud of. A parent rechanges everything. For me, it re-centers that idea that getting it right isn't a matter of whether or not I'm right. It's a matter of whether or not we're doing the right thing for the next generation.
Thanks for coming to the show, Sarah. We'll catch everybody next time.
Thanks for having me, Chad.
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About Sarah Riggs Amico
Specialties: General Corporate/Management: Corporate & Strategic Planning, Acquisition Strategy, Recapitalization, New Market Strategy, Mergers & Acquisitions
Adaptation of Intellectual Property into entertainment properties, Entertainment Marketing, Brand Integration, Leveraging Entertainment as part of a brand's Marketing Mix, Brand & Marketing Strategy
