With a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, years of involvement at the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, and a current spot in the Master of Business Creation (MBC) program under his belt, Jake Peters is currently working to improve the current state of the trucking industry using entrepreneurship.
After completing his bachelor’s degree in the summer of 2021, Peters launched Meramec Solutions, a company devoted to improving several of the staffing issues currently taking place in the trucking industry.
“We’re a tech-enabled recruiting company focused on helping trucking companies hire truck drivers through innovative technological services,” Peters said. “Right now, we’re focused on social media advertising and driver recruiting. We’re also implementing new services to assist with driver hiring and retention.”
Peters learned about the staffing issues in the trucking business after working in the industry during his undergrad. He decided that the problems were serious enough that he wanted to use his entrepreneurial experience to do something about them.
“Obviously it’s a niche service addressing a problem that most people probably aren’t familiar with, so I was lucky to have a part-time position during my undergrad that exposed me to the trucking industry and many of the problems within it,” Peters said. “This mainly includes major driver shortages – upwards of 80,000 drivers short nationwide with that number growing every year.”
Though this is Peters’ first time launching a full-time business, he is no stranger to the world of startups. He spent much of his time at the University of Utah at the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, where he worked as a student leader and was involved with multiple startup teams. This — coupled with the fact that he’s always known he wanted entrepreneurship to be a part of his life — is what eventually led him to recognize the need for a business like Meramec Solutions.
“I saw that the problem wasn’t really getting addressed, and my co-founder and I felt like we had some ideas that could help the industry,” Peters said. “We ran the business for about nine months before I decided to get involved with the MBC program.”
The MBC program is a new graduate program for entrepreneurs offered by the Eccles School. It gives real-life startups the unique opportunity to learn and grow with a curriculum tailored to their specific needs and goals. Businesses of many different types, backgrounds, and stages can come together within the same cohort and learn from and alongside one another as they all grow their startups.
“It’s really cool to see all these different experiences that we’ve all had leading us to the same spot, and those different experiences help us help each other which makes for a cool class dynamic,” Peters said. “It feels like growth is steady and repeatable within the MBC program. I don’t think I would be able to learn quite as much about the entrepreneurial process were it not for those tight-knit relationships we have there.”
Meramec Solutions continues growing and working to end staffing shortages every single day. It is a very real and tangible example of how one small team can solve large, everyday issues when equipped with the right tools of entrepreneurship.
Learn more about Meramec Solutions here: meramecsolutions.com.
Jake Peters launched Meramec Solutions to improve staffing in the trucking industry.
