Profile

To be CEO is to sit in meetings, hour after hour. I get hundreds of emails.  There is no time to analyze anything myself but I have the ability to have any analysis done. With a company of 13,000 employees, if I have a question, I can delegate gathering the information I need to make a decision to someone else.  As good as that sounds, it’s challenging because I am getting fed information all the time. 

At the end of the day, the leadership and decision making stops here. Flying J has many different business segments.  I’m expected to take in all of the information and intelligently make decisions.  At the same time, I try to move the company forward to be successful. 

I work in a corporate office high rise with nice accommodations and private space.

I work with highly educated men every day.  They range from attorneys, financial people, and the upper management of Flying J.

Thinking on your feet. 
You also have to have a view to the future. 
You have to be able to ask the right questions. 
You have to be able to interact, motivate, and guide people. 
I think communication is a huge part of the job. 
You also have to be able to analyze issues quickly—you’re handed numbers and you have to be able to quickly discern what it means.  

In my position as CEO, if I wasn’t prioritizing the way I am with my four children, I could put in 80-90 hours per week easily.  Because I prioritize differently, I give up a bit of what I could give.  I work probably 60-70 hours per week.  I commute two hours a day.  I’m always conducting business in the car while I’m commuting. I’m also attached to my blackberry 24/7.

Yes.  I usually travel one to two nights per week.

I love the challenge.  It is mentally very stimulating.

I don’t like the hours involved.  I also don’t like the stress of having so many people and people’s lives relying on decisions that I make.

Learning and growing inspires me no matter how old I am. 
Making a difference is very important to me whether that is with my kids, community service organization, or at Flying J.  For me personally, I have to make a difference in someone’s life. 

My mom was my biggest influence.  I respected her even though she didn’t know exactly how to mentor me.  She encouraged me to go to school.  She married young but she was an ambitious woman.  I was able to see how that played out for her.  By the time she was old enough to have her own business, I was old enough to watch her.  That had a big impact on me. 

My mom pounding it into my head not to get married young.  Marrying early is one of the biggest decisions someone can make in their life. It has a major impact on what life becomes.  Yet marriage is a decision you can make later. 

If you make it on the earlier end, in my opinion and my mom’s opinion, those options never come back to you in quite the same form.  If I’d married young, I would have missed out on so much travel. 

Granted some would argue that you could travel on the other side of your life but the experience would be different.  I believed in living on my own.  I learned and built confidence in myself as an individual first as opposed to as a couple.  All those things have made me a better lifetime partner.

Keep all your options open. 

When you’re a teenager you may not know exactly what you want to do.  Try and take time and figure that out if you can. But if you don’t ultimately decide what you want to do, prepare yourself as best you can to take on anything that presents itself.  In my situation that has proven to be an amazing path to take.

There isn’t.  Luckily for me at a young age, I learned that even if I didn’t know what I wanted to do, there was nothing that I could do to destroy my future if I did positive things, whether it was education, better job, etc. 

Every little thing that I could do to better myself and help me learn and grow, even though I may not have been sure of the path ahead, allowed me to keep options open. 

Spend time with my family.  I exercise, run, ski, and travel.  I do a lot of those things with my family as well.

Travel is certainly at the top of the list.  I’m passionate about my family— my husband and my children—and seeing what they do and how they develop.  I am passionate about being a family unit. 

It’s almost impossible.  I would say it’s unfair so say that you can have a career like I have without making choices.  Something is going to give. 

If you accept responsibility to be the CEO of a company this size, sacrifice comes with the responsibility.  In my case, it’s my family.  I have four children between the ages of 9 and 14.  I do not have very much time to spend with them.  It’s hard to balance, but you do the best you can.  During the week I go 100%, but on the weekends I draw the line. I try and keep weekends segregated to family time as much as possible. 

When I was in high school, I did not necessarily know what I wanted to do. My parents were entrepreneurial and I saw them in business.  I also believed a college education was important although my parents had not gone to college. 

When I started looking at colleges, I did not have a lot of mentors to help me.  One of the things I had always enjoyed doing with my family was travelling outside of Utah.  I believed I wanted to use college as a way to get other experiences in other geographic locations.  When I started applying to colleges, I received a scholarship to Utah State University. It was important to me that I make my own way.  So I decided to get my general education at Utah State University, which is where I started. 

I got very involved in many different activities.  I did well with grades, which was extremely important to me.  It helped keep doors open.  After a few years at Utah State University, I kept to the plan that I had when I entered Utah State to go to school out of state.  During my sophomore year at Utah State, I began applying to California schools.  I transferred to Pepperdine University, which is where I graduated with a degree in Marketing. 

I also had a goal during that time.  I wanted to go to a study abroad program.  After my sophomore year, I happened upon an opportunity to participate in a semester at sea that allowed me to go to 12 different countries and travel around the world in 100 days.  That experience proved to be a very pivotal trip.  I was a girl from Utah who had been exposed to some things but not a lot.  Suddenly, I was on a ship with 400 kids from all different areas of the world.  It was quite a lot to take in and truly impacted what I became in more ways than I can articulate.  I came back from that trip at the age of 20.  I felt differently about what I was capable of, what the world is, and how different the areas of the world were.  

I chose Pepperdine because I had applied to Pepperdine out of high school and had been accepted.  I really had a goal that I wanted to get out of college early, which is very difficult if you transfer colleges.  Pepperdine accepted credits from other schools I had attended.  It allowed me to complete my education quickly.  The disservice I did to myself was that I had been very involved at Utah State and had more emotional connections there.  Because I was at Pepperdine only two semesters, I wasn’t motivated to get involved. 

After I graduated from Pepperdine University, I honestly did not know how to get a job.  I graduated in December.  It was not a great recruiting time and economic times were not the best.  I interviewed for various positions but did not have a lot of direction as to what I wanted to do.  I ended up going to work for our family business, Flying J.  I went to work in the refining area of Flying J.  I bought and sold propane and butane products and managed a fleet of rail cars for two and a half years.  I was 21. I would go to conventions where I was probably ten years junior to all the other people.  There were very few women in that environment.  I found it to be really fun.  I did not see it as a detriment.  People were really receptive to me even though I was that young.  It was a great experience. 

Because I had only lived away from Utah for a year and a half, I still had the travel bug.  I had a desire to see other parts of the U.S. and live in other parts of the country outside of Utah.  Because I had so little direction on career and the economy still wasn’t great, I tried to figure out something positive I could do in my life. 

I ran into someone who suggested I get an M.B.A.  To that point, I did not really have a desire to get a higher education.  I didn’t think I wanted to work in the family business long-term.  Someone suggested I apply to Harvard.  I didn’t think I could get in but someone told me Harvard cared about having a diverse student body.  I had good grades.  I was accepted to Harvard’s business school when I was 25.  I had an amazing experience. 

One of the biggest “take aways” for me was the people.  Even to this day, at the age of 45, to watch what these people have done with their lives is amazing.  Even more than that, it was the first time I’ve ever had exposure to other women who had taken paths like I had.  Most of my friends had gotten married very young. They had attended some college.  When I went to Harvard, my Utah friends were married and starting families.  I was a in a very different place.  At Harvard I found a lot of other women who were in the same place.

After business school, I wasn’t ready to come back to Utah. I did not want to do the family business thing again.  At the time I graduated from Harvard, most students became either an investment banker or a management consultant. I did not want to do either of those things. 

In between my two years at Harvard, I made a great decision and was lucky enough to land an internship at American Express.  I spent three months finding out that I had no interest in working for a big corporation.  That was a great learning experience. I had a blast because I got to live in New York City, which was also another goal of mine. 

I still did not know what I wanted to do but I had eliminated some things.    I took a job at a telecom company as a national sales person with a small company in Stamford.  That was a great learning experience.  It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about start-ups.   

At some point in my late twenties, I decided I didn’t want to live back East forever but I wasn’t in a hurry.  My father offered me the opportunity to come back and build a hotel in Salt Lake City.  I knew enough about my dad to know he delegated a lot and if I did it, it would be a wonderful opportunity.  The full circle irony is that when I was in high school, I actually thought it would be fun to go to hotel school and get a degree in hotel management. 

I had gotten advice from someone who told me I should stay open for opportunities and that a business degree was better.  I had never thought about it after high school. It was ironic to suddenly be facing going into the hotel business.  I came back to Utah to start a hotel.  Basically the only tool I had was an education and three or four years of work experience in an unrelated industry. My father gave me an unusual opportunity.  I had the confidence that I could do it.

I came back to Salt Lake City to build a 175 room hotel from the ground up.  My training was just staying in hotels.  The biggest reason I was able to be successful was that I believed I could do it.  That was the biggest thing I had going for me.  I built the Crystal Inn in 1993. 

I actually ended up meeting my husband the same weekend I was given the opportunity to do hotels.  After a year of building the hotel without him, we married.  A year and a half after we were married, he joined me.  Together we grew the business to 13 Crystal Inns. 

At that point, in my early thirties, I began a family.  I had four children in five years.

Approximately one year ago, I took on the job of CEO of Flying J.