Forget a six-figure MBA — the path to running a company can start with a certification to operate forklifts. At least that was the path of Ron Vachris, CEO of the wholesale supermarket and shopping club chain Costco.
Today, he leads one of the largest and most admired companies in the world, with a compensation package valued at almost US$14 million. But Vachris never aimed to reach the presidential office. Instead, he built his career step by step, guided by advice from his father, who worked in electrical grid maintenance.
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“I wish I had had a vision in the 1980s of what this industry and this company could become,” Vachris said last month during an Economic Club of Chicago event. “But this confirms what my father said: find a company that represents the values you want to defend, and the rest is up to you.”
His father’s lesson was simple: “Don’t chase positions. Don’t chase anything great. Just build your own success.”
Vachris took the advice seriously. After graduating from high school in the early 1980s, he entered Glendale Community College in Arizona, where he studied business while working part-time as a forklift operator at Price Club, a cash-and-carry chain that would later merge with Costco in 1993.
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Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to assistant warehouse manager — and never thought about completing a degree again.
The rise has continued steadily, including promotions to regional vice president in 1999, chief operating officer in 2016, and CEO in 2024. It’s been a trajectory so unlikely that even Vachris himself has trouble believing it.
“If you asked me ten years ago if I would be sitting here today, I would have said I would highly doubt it,” he said.
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But his four-decade journey was based on another simple message from his father: “Take the worst job in a big company, and the rest is up to you.”
Leaders at Walmart, Nike and GM also started in entry-level positions
Reaching the top management of a company can seem like an impossible climb. But Vachris is not the only executive to prove that occupying the presidential office does not always require constantly changing jobs or following a perfectly designed career plan.
Some of America’s top corporate leaders—including the CEOs of Walmart, Nike, and General Motors—started in entry-level roles and rose to the top after decades at the same company.
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At Nike, CEO Elliott Hill began his career in 1988 as an apparel sales intern. Over more than three decades, he held leadership positions in Europe and North America, eventually leading consumer and market-facing operations before being chosen CEO in 2024.
Similarly, Mary Barra only had one company under her belt: General Motors. She began in the 1980s as a student in a university-business cooperation program at the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), working on the assembly line as a quality inspector for the Pontiac division.
Her first full-time position was as an electrical engineer. He later became manager of GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant and gradually advanced through the executive ranks. In 2014, she was appointed CEO.
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Barra has already stated that having grown up in an industrial environment was fundamental to his leadership, as it gave him direct knowledge of how each stage of the production process influences the final result.
Meanwhile, John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart, began his journey as an hourly employee at a garden center. His predecessor, Doug McMillon, followed a similarly modest path: He began by unloading trucks at a Walmart distribution center before taking the company’s top job.
Like Vachris, McMillon attributed his rise not to chasing promotions but to quietly preparing for when they came.
“One of the reasons I received the opportunities I did was that I offered to take on responsibilities when my boss was traveling or visiting stores, for example,” he once recalled in an interview with Stratechery.
“With this, I put myself in a situation where my promotion represented little risk, because people had already seen me performing the role.”
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