Forget a six-figure MBA—the path to the C-suite can start with a forklift certification. At least, that was the route for Ron Vachris, the CEO of Costco.
Today, he leads one of the world’s largest and most admired companies, with a compensation package worth nearly $14 million. But Vachris never set out chasing the corner office. Instead, he approached his career one step at a time, guided by advice from his father, a utility lineman.
“I wish I had the vision back in the ’80s about what this industry and what this company could be,” Vachris said last month at the Economic Club of Chicago. “But it rings true to my father’s comments: find this company that stands for what you want to stand for, and then the rest is up to you.”
His father’s lesson was simple: “Don’t chase a title. Don’t chase anything big. Just go make yourself your own success.”
Vachris took the advice to heart. After graduating high school in the early 1980s, he enrolled at Glendale Community College in Arizona, studying business while working part-time as a forklift driver for Price Club, the warehouse retailer that would later merge with Costco in 1993. Before long, he was promoted to assistant warehouse manager—and never looked back on finishing a degree.
The climb continued steadily, including promotions in 1999 to regional vice president, chief operating officer in 2016, and by 2024, CEO. It’s a career rise so unlikely that even Vachris struggles to believe it himself.
“Ten years ago, if you asked me if I’d be sitting here today, I’d tell you I doubt it very much,” he said.
But his four-decade rise was rooted in a simple message, again from his father: “Take the worst job in a great company, and the rest is up to you.”
Like Costco’s CEO, the leaders of Walmart, Nike, and GM climbed from entry-level jobs to the top
Breaking into the C-suite can feel like an impossible ladder to climb. But Vachris isn’t the only executive to prove that a corner office doesn’t always require job-hopping or a perfectly mapped career plan. Some of America’s biggest corporate leaders—including the CEOs of Walmart, Nike, and General Motors—rose from entry-level jobs to the top spot after decades inside a single company.
At Nike, CEO Elliott Hill began his career in 1988 as an apparel sales intern. Over more than three decades, he climbed through leadership roles across Europe and North America, eventually overseeing consumer and marketplace operations before being tapped as CEO in 2024.
Similarly, Mary Barra has only had one company on her resume: General Motors. She started out as a co-op student in the 1980s at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) on the assembly line as a quality inspector at the Pontiac Motor Division. Her first full-time job was as an electrical engineer before later becoming plant manager at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant and steadily climbing the executive ranks. In 2014, she was named CEO.
Barra has said that growing up in manufacturing proved fundamental to her leadership, giving her firsthand insight into how every step of the production process shapes the final product.
Meanwhile, John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart, got his start as an hourly employee working in a garden center. His predecessor, Doug McMillon, followed a similarly humble path—starting out unloading trailers at a Walmart distribution center before eventually taking the top job.
Similar to Vachris, McMillion credited his rise not to chasing promotions, but to quietly preparing for them.
“One of the reasons that I got the opportunities that I got was that I would raise my hand when my boss was out of town and he or she was visiting stores or something,” he once recalled in an interview with Stratechery.
“I then put myself in an environment where I became a low-risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job.”
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