Kelly Crook, CEO of David’s Bridal lived with $ 882 (about $ 5.8 thousand) a month and a diet made up of corn bread and beans when she was starting her career. Balancing studies and parallel work as a young single mother, Cook could barely support himself before reaching executive positions at DSW, Kmart and Pier 1 Imports, and take the lead of the popular American wedding dress network in April this year.
Others, such as Mark Cuban from Starbucks from Shark Tank and Howard Schultz, have stories of similar humble origin.
For some, the path to success begins with a comfortable MBA and a rapid postgraduate program. For the giant’s CEO of the wedding dresses, the beginning was harder than the majority. She could barely support herself, reconciling weekends working as a bartender, taking care of her young son and going to college when she started.
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“My net salary a month, when I divorced her father and was living alone as a single mother, was $ 882. My car port was $ 350 ($ 1,900), and the rent, $ 350,” Kelly Cook told the The New York Times In a recent interview.
To turn around with the little she had in the early days of her career, she “ate a lot of beans and corn bread.”
Cook currently leads a giant of wedding dresses with 200 stores in the US and Canada, with about 5,000 employees.
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But coming back a few decades, his life was quite different; She grew up without much money, having to get a job right after high school to help support her mother. Cook then managed to attend higher education, marrying “very, very fast” during the years in the community college and having a child.
The 58 -year -old executive had her first white collar job on Continental Airlines, which led her to executive positions in retail giants such as DSW, Kmart and Pier 1 Imports. But those early days, taking classes during the day and working at night, gave him an invaluable life lesson.
“This proved to me that life is hard, but you don’t have to worry about life,” said Cook. “Just worry about today.”
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In line of poverty
David’s Bridal executive has a story of origin very different from people like Elon Musk and David Koch.
Cook was raised between the low and middle class by a motherwife and a firefighter father, but her life changed in high school when her parents divorced, forcing her to give up a bag at Baylor University to help her mother’s accounts.
She then managed to attend a community college – taking all available math classes – while falling in love, marry quickly and had a son eight months later.
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While still at school, she and her husband separated, assuming the responsibility of being a single mother.
“The classes were during the day, and I worked at night,” recalled Cook. “I was bartender at Bennigan’s on weekends, and during the week I worked as a receptionist in the emergency of the hospital where my mother worked.”
Thanks to her determination and passion for mathematics, the CEO born in the southern US became finance and logistics analyst at Continental Airlines in 1994. She rose to the director of customer relationship management at the airline, proving her leadership capacity to assume major administrative positions.
Cook was vice president of employee and clients engagement at Waste Management Inc., a $ 93 billion company, before taking over as a marketing director in major retail networks such as DSW, Kmart, Sears and Pier 1 Imports. Entering David’s Bridal Marketing Director in 2019, she reached the post of CEO in April this year.
Cook is not the only CEO who had to battle to achieve his success.
Howard Schultzformer CEO of the Café Starbucks, which is worth $ 111 billion, grew up in a housing development in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and was the first in the family attending college.
A CEO gives the price of manger, Pano Christouhe was also born in a working family and started working at McDonald’s, earning $ 3.40 per hour.
Doug McMillion He was Walmart’s deposit worker at 17 earning $ 6.50 per hour unloading trucks before climbing the company for 30 years until he became CEO in 2014.
E Neil Cliffordhead of Kurt Geiger, cleaned bathrooms at a Fiat dealership to make extra money while trying to enter the fashion world.
The Series Investor Mark Cuban He also had a difficult beginning in his entrepreneurial career. The former Shark Tank instead lived financially tight during his 20 years, when he launched his technology company microsolutations. Cuban was out of money, I didn’t take days off for years because I was “broken to the damn”.
“Six guys lived in a three -bedroom apartment, which was not good. It was a hole,” he said in an interview with Sports Illustrated.
This story was originally published on Fortune.com
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