Featured Story:  “Mississippi’s Priest Has Bases Loaded”

Written By: David Abbott, Managing Editor, Southern Loggin’ Times

Company: Tal Baby Enterprises
Location: Centreville, MS
SLT Issue: August 2019

Talmadge “Tal” Priest has been running all his life…running track, running the baseball diamond and the football field, running a logging crew for his dad and now running his own company, Tal Baby Enterprises (TBE).

Although he grew up around the business – Tal represents the sixth generation of his family to make a living from the forests – for him, carrying on that family tradition wasn’t the original plan.

“I had helped in the woods in the summers growing up,” Tal says, but he had not considered it a career option for himself. “I had no intention of going into logging; I planned on working in a plant, maybe.”

The former college athlete tried logging for a summer internship with his dad’s company CST Timber and got bit by the logging bug.

For the first two years on his own, Tal ran the loader full-time. He found it difficult to run a machine and run a business well at the same time. “It got to be hard to buy my own timber, run the job, do all the maintenance, do all the hiring, all the paperwork, deal with landowners, payroll, taxes, insurance – there’s a lot more to it than running a machine,” he says.

Mercifully, hard work paid off, and while he still fills in on machines regularly when he needs to, Tal can now spend the majority of his time running the business and leave the running of machines to his employees.