To most people, cattle ranching and nickel refining do not usually go hand in hand with femininity—they don’t even seem to go hand in hand with each other. However, most people haven’t had the chance to meet KaLeigh Long.
“A lot of women CEOs that come up through the ranks feel like they have to completely abandon their female identity and put on a man’s skin, so to speak,” Long told Newsweek. “You don’t have to do that to be taken seriously. You don’t have to do that to succeed.”
Despite her perfectly manicured nails, Long has never been afraid to get her hands dirty, starting her professional life as a teenager and working her way through a range of different enterprises before founding her most recent venture, Westwin Elements, in 2022.
“When I was a teenager, I got a loan from the USDA to buy my own cows. I grew up ranching; I come from a long line of cowboys. That was my first taste of business and actual cash flow,” Long said.
Long then started an advertising company, studied at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., flipped houses and started a meat subscription box company. Ultimately, Long began studying Congo, which led her to her most recent—and perhaps biggest—venture.
At a dinner in the early stages of learning about Congo’s massive cobalt production, a different company representative was asked an important question that inadvertently became the start of Westwin.
“Somebody said, ‘Where are you going to refine it?’ And nobody could answer that.” Long recalled. “The businesswoman in me almost immediately went home and started doing a lot of research and was realizing I had focused so much on the mining, the origin of a lot of these materials and how it affected us geopolitically, but what I realized was that the U.S. had zero—zero—processing capacity for many of these materials. I was just compelled by a crisis and an opportunity.”
This opportunity turned out to be America’s first major nickel refinery, with Long at the helm. In a global industry controlled by men, Long believes her identity as a woman has helped make her company so successful.
“I think that men and women have strengths that are unique from each other,” Long mused. “Women are more naturally attuned to finding risk. I think my strength is ‘Where can this go wrong?’”
Channeling this strength, Long has never let her gender minimize her impact on any industries she has been a part of. She embraces her femininity while achieving her goals in male-dominated fields.
“What I’ve found is, regardless of anyone’s opinions on gender, if you’re doing something and you are leading with that mission and that goal and don’t get distracted by trying to be someone or getting someone else to recognize who you are being, you’ll often find success even if it wasn’t expected,” Long said.
Part of Long’s personal mission is to keep in mind her own background and to use her experiences as a model for how to treat employees on every level of Westwin.
“I grew up very much on the blue-collar side. I actually don’t think I have any men in my family that have a college degree,” Long said. “And yet they are incredible men. They are brilliant. They work so hard. They are what makes this country run.”
At one point in our interview, Long got up from her desk to proudly share a photo that she keeps in her office: smiling Westwin plant employees, standing in front of the machines that they operate.
Long has found success without sacrificing herself, her values or where she came from.
“[Do] not bury or sacrifice your femininity. … In the early days, I was like, if I’m going to be able to do this, I have to slick my hair back; I have to be firm and not wear my pretty clothes and do it like a man, and that was insecurity in me,” Long remembers. “One day I just said, ‘No, I just need to be who God made me to be, and I’m going to do it differently because of who I am, but that’s going to be the best way that I should do it.’”
Long will join Newsweek at this year’s inaugural Women’s Global Impact forum. The August 5 event, hosted at Newsweek‘s headquarters in New York City, will bring together some of the world’s top female executives and connect them with rising stars across industries and job functions.
For more information on the event, please visit the Women’s Global Impact homepage.
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