Three years after joining Verizon in 2001, Angie Klein ’01 served as part of the team assigned to launch a company television service. They had 10 months to complete the task, or in Klein’s words, “disrupt the industry by finding a hole in the market.” Creating their design for Verizon FiOS TV from scratch, the team refused to imitate anyone else in the industry, delivering video over a 100 percent fiber-optic network offering an alternative to cable and satellite services.

“The next two years of my career I don’t remember much except working the entire time. It was a treadmill set on seven-and-a-half that I never got off,” she said. “But by December, we launched and changed the way cable companies thought about business. When I look back now, we disrupted the industry.”

For the next 10 years, Klein changed jobs every 18-24 months within the company. She now serves the company in her role as marketing executive, telecommunications/entertainment. She shared insight into her career success as the keynote speaker at a women in business conference hosted by the college. She ended the keynote by sharing three rules that defined her success.

“Always play beyond your position. You need to know everything about your own position and master it, but always understand the other areas. The second rule is say yes consistently to new roles and challenges, and the third rule is to give a shit. Saying I’m passionate about the work I do, wouldn’t fully capture what I mean. If you come to work every day and care passionately about what you do, you will deliver and be successful.”

Betsy Grindlay ’07 brings passion to her job every day as brand manager at Speedway Motors, which bills itself as America’s Oldest Speed Shop while tailoring products to hot rod and racing enthusiasts across the country.

“I oversee all the content produced and shared to customers through emails, webpage banners, social media, print ads and event planning,” said Grindlay. “It’s a combination of fun and hard work, which results in a huge reward seeing customers engage with our content. Every day is different and new opportunities are presented regularly.”

A case in point, Grindlay recently took on a promotional project with four other women dubbed The Bucket Beauties. The project involved building a T bucket hot rod using only Speedway Motors parts. The hitch was, most of the women had little experience working on cars. Grindlay used the opportunity to promote the project on a blog to launch a set of new fenders for the car, and demonstrate how virtually anyone can succeed using Speedway Motors parts if they put their heart into it.

“It was a huge task considering most of us had no idea what we were doing,” she said. “We were able to piece together one of Speedway’s infamous T bucket car kits, and show how we did it on our blog as we went along. We’ve just about completed the project now and were able to express our personalities along with the fun we had building the T bucket.”

Grindlay, who was a finance and marketing major at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Business, believes her four years of college set her up for a successful career. Along with the marketing work she performs as brand manager, she also uses her financial background at Speedway Motors.

“I spend quite a bit of time examining and approving budgets and expenses. Dr. Donna Dudney (associate dean for undergraduate curriculum and programs and associate professor of finance) was one of my biggest influences for helping unlock my financial prowess. Along with the marketing group projects which taught me how to present a thoughtful marketing plan, I’m using what I learned in college regularly in my job,” she said.