NORTH JACKSON – A North Jackson-based family trucking company rolls into its 40th year in business this year.
Truck Specialists Inc., also known as TSI Western Star, helps local drivers keep their trucks on the road.
“When we first started selling trucks, it was mostly owner-operators, over the road operators and sleeper trucks. We evolved over the years to concentrate on smaller businesses who had multiple trucks and further focused on doing the vocational side of the market,” says Clint Moore, TSI president.
Moore took over the company from his parents, Bill and Vicki Moore, who started the business in 1984. It began as an independent truck repair shop with Bill renting one bay in a Meridian Road building in Youngstown. Bill worked on the trucks and Vicki filled office duties. Bill later expanded to three bays.
The business moved to its current site on South Bailey Road in North Jackson in 1992 and took on the TSI Western Star franchise. The company provides in-house truck equipment upfitting, adding features so it matches the job. The company is also a dealer for Beau-Roc Steel Dump Bodies and Serco Log Loaders.
TSI Western Star employs about 35.
Specializing in the vocational truck market, TSI Western sells dump trucks and construction and road paving vehicles, as well as the parts to repair them. Contractors and municipalities come to TSI to buy plow trucks and salt spreaders for the winter and equipment to repair roads during the summer.
At age 6, Clint Moore started helping the family business on Saturdays – mopping the bathroom floor, sorting bolts and “running around getting dirty.” In 1992, he started doing some service work on trucks and scrubbing bays. Once he became old enough to drive, he says he was the “go-getter.”
As he grew up, he worked his way up through the company. That wasn’t his initial plan, however. He earned his industrial technology degree from Ohio University, worked for Parker Hannifin and lived in Forest City, N.C., and Elyria, Ohio, before returning home.
Moore worked in every department of the business – parts, service, sales and IT – before becoming the general manager in 2009. Through a buy-sell agreement with his parents, he took ownership of the business five years ago.
Bill Moore says he and his wife were confident their son could run the business since he’d worked there from such a young age. His wife agrees.
“It was our baby for a long time,” says Vicki Moore. “Honestly, he did so well with every position that he was in whether it was parts or service or sales or general management that we felt very confident. This was our ceiling. But it’s your floor. So you take it to wherever… you expand from there. He’s done very well. We’re very proud of him.”
In October 2023, the younger Moore began expanding the business again, branching out to sell tractors and lawnmowers from a location on state Route 45, south of North Jackson. That location, Tractor Specialties, officially launched with a ribbon cutting in May and specializes in Mahindra products.
After Covid, he saw a need to expand the products TSI sold, but the pandemic is still affecting the supply chain for the trucking industry.
“There’s plenty of demand out there still,” says Clint Moore. “Over the past few years, supply chain issues have really put a backlog in being able to get vocational trucks. So we’re still quite a ways out on trying to fill the need.”
Covid has not been the only challenge for the business. During the 2008 financial crisis, business slowed, leading to layoffs, something Moore says was difficult.
Through the years, the trucking industry has transitioned from manual transmissions to 90% automatics. Hands-free technology is appearing in trucks too and Moore says Western Star’s sister brand, Freightliner, is making EVs for some road trucks, box trucks and delivery vans.
Moore and his wife, Kristen, who works in the TSI office, still get advice from his parents when they need it.
“It feels pretty good for us to have made it for 40 years,” Bill Moore says. “It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. It went by pretty fast.”
Pictured at top: The TSI Western Star family: Clint Moore, president; his wife, Kristen Moore, payroll clerk; and his parents and founders of the business, Vicki and Bill Moore.