Queen of the Road
ON THE MORNING of her first day of work, Tana Greene, then 16 years old, woke up, made breakfast for herself and her husband, fed her baby, showered and put curlers in her hair, did her makeup, and walked into the hallway of their home.
There, her husband, Larry, stood aiming a shotgun at her face.
“Go ahead,” she remembers him saying. “Walk out the door.”
Greene crumpled to the floor, and raised her hands protectively above her head. She saw rage in his eyes, but oddly, he was also laughing.
“I think his idea was ‘If I give her enough fear, she’s going to behave at work,’” Greene says. “After about 30 minutes of that, he let me go.”
As she recalls the ordeal, which happened in 1975, Greene, dressed in a white cashmere knee-length vest, black leather pants, and stiletto boots, is poised and smiling, and her eyes are sparkling. She is youthful for both her age, 58, and for what she has endured. It’s hard to believe she was ever that cowering teenager—“a shadow,” as an old friend of her ex-husband remembers her.
Even Tana Greene doesn’t recognize much about that girl anymore. She is now a serial entrepreneur: She’s the co-founder and CEO of two North Carolina–based national staffing companies that, together, are on target to hit $80 million in revenue this year. Greene’s success has brought her a lifestyle that she couldn’t have imagined in her younger years. She and her second husband, Mike Greene, live in a palatial, country club home on Lake Norman, just north of Charlotte. She and Mike hobnob with the local moneyed set. Most recently, she founded Blue Bloodhound, a startup that has raised roughly $9 million in venture funding from investors including Oscar Salazar, the former CTO of Uber; Curtis Arledge, the former CEO of BNY Mellon’s investment management and markets group; and John McCabe, the retired head of global operations at PayPal. The company aims to transform how hiring works in one of the most heavily regulated, conservative, and good ol’ boy industries in the United States—trucking.
Greene’s willingness to wade into this notoriously tough, male-dominated industry is testament to just how far she’s come from her teenage self. And powering nearly every step she’s taken away from the terrifying lost years of her youth has been a dream—to build something no one can ever take away.
BLUE BLOODHOUND’S staff is assembled in the company’s headquarters, in Hickory, to discuss the results of their
