The Three Women Behind Two Men

Upon hearing the brand name Two Men and a Truck, the immediate assumption would be that the company was founded by two men who, well, had a truck. Although the first movers were two men—Jon and Brig Sorber—the company was founded by their mother, Mary Ellen Sheets. The brothers began providing moving services during their high-school summers, but the requests kept coming in when they left for college. Feeding the boys’ entrepreneurial spirits, Sheets hired two other men and bought a new truck to keep up with demand. The brand grew by a truck-per-year in the Lansing, Mich. area, which led Sheets to invite her daughter, Melanie Bergeron, to join the brand, taking the company in a totally new direction. “She just taught me what she knew. Training consisted of trial and error, and based off of what she learned, she wrote the operations manual,” said Bergeron.  “It was just a humble, simple beginning.” Bergeron started her location while still working in pharmaceutical sales, and she transferred her skills to grow her own successful operations. “I was independent in the sense that I wanted to create my own destiny,” said Bergeron. As she lead the path in proving that the family had something special, Sheets started franchising out the concept in 1989. In 2012, Sheets’ granddaughter, Alicia Sorber Gallegos, was another groundbreaking piece of the female leadership has built Two Men and a Truck into a success. Gallegos, whose experience with the brand went from working at the corporate office to working at a franchise location in Chicago, brought the company to Southern California to spearhead growth within San Diego with her husband, Pedro, as her partner. “Growing up and watching the business grow was really exciting,” Gallegos said, noting that she wasn't planning on necessarily going into the family business. “I was exposed to it at a really young age, and it made me interested in the brand and interested in business in general.” But what really sold Gallegos on going full throttle with the company was working in start-up mode at the Chicago location. Sheets and Bergeron now sit on the company’s board, with Gallegos as the newest female family member making waves in the company. Her plan is to open four to six locations to close out the San Diego territory within the next five years. All the success within the company points back to Sheets’ teachings and lessons. Some of her tools for achieving greatness include always giving back to the community, constantly putting the customer first, not listening to negative comments and embracing any opportunity because you don’t know where it will lead you. “If you want to do something bad enough, you can make it happen,” she said. “Even if you can only do a little each day – do something, and when you will look back, you will see you have accomplished a lot!”