The first truck sat in a lot, and Nyzinga Patterson owned it.
Not a share of it. Not a stake in someone else's fleet. The whole thing — the keys, the title, the risk, the diesel bill. She signed for it in August of 2021, which anyone who was paying attention will remember as the exact worst moment to get into moving freight. Ports were clogged. Shelves were empty. The phrase "supply chain crisis" was on the evening news every single night.
That's when she started MHNP Logistics.
Let me tell you what Nyzinga had before that day. A master's degree from Penn. A corporate career that had walked her right up to the edge of the C-suite, close enough to see the room. And zero days — not one — of trucking experience.
On paper, none of it added up. A woman with that résumé does not typically end up learning the difference between a dry van and a reefer. She was supposed to be waiting. Waiting for the title. Waiting for someone above her to decide it was her turn.
She stopped waiting.
I love that about her, and I want you to sit with why. So many of us have spent years being excellent inside somebody else's building, doing the work of the job above us while holding the salary of the one below. We tell ourselves the recognition is coming. We are patient. We are *good.* And the whole time, the door we're standing outside was never going to open the way we hoped, because the system on the other side of it wasn't built to open for us.
Nyzinga didn't curse the door. She built her own building.
The learning curve was not gentle. She didn't inherit a fleet or a Rolodex of shippers. She got the certifications herself. She learned the routes, the regulations, the margins that make or break a load. She hired a crew and figured out how to lead people who knew things she was still learning. There's a particular humility in being the boss and the beginner at the same time, and she carried both without flinching.
Five years later, here's the ledger. She owns the truck. She runs the crew. She holds the certifications she once had to go earn from scratch. And she just graduated from a scale-up program — the kind you get into precisely because you've already proven the small version works and now you're ready to do it bigger.
She turned herself into the CEO the corporate ladder was too slow to name.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Nobody handed her a title. The market didn't welcome her. The timing was terrible. And she looked at all of it and decided the person who was going to promote her was going to be her.
So when people ask me what it takes to start, I think of Nyzinga in that lot with her own set of keys.
You don't wait to become the CEO. *You just start signing the papers.*
