Meaghan Hargrave

I really credit my success to being gritty and exposing myself to jobs and taking opportunities. I've always been obsessed with working, and I was privileged to start young, working as a pharmacy technician when I was 16. Most, if not all, of my career jobs have been with female leaders or female owners, and that wasn't by design, it just happened. Working with these women was very influential because I got to see women in power and have that as the normal. I learned through doing, getting close to founders and entrepreneurs, and doing anything I could to explore different industries and different skill sets. When I took on a really substantial role within my current company, I was craving more fundamental training because I was essentially at the top and didn't have a structure of leadership programs. So I enrolled with the Yale School of Management, and working with Yale every year has been a pivotal moment in my career. I really believe in surrounding yourself with people smarter than so you can extract as much as you can at every opportunity. I want to make sure I'm bringing new, engaging content to our leadership program. I put my best foot forward and put everything I've got into any role I have, because you're going to get that much more out of it.

The best career advice I've ever received is to get as close to the sun as you can. That means if you're looking to be in an industry or work in a field, find someone that you really idolize or find a brand that you really align with, and just get as close to the sun as possible in any capacity. Be humble in what your roles are, because you're going to learn through all of them. The other piece of advice that stuck with me from when I was very young was that no matter what job you're doing, whatever you put into it, you're going to get out of it. Not every job is going to be a forever thing, but you are going to learn something from every role you ever have, so put your best foot forward and put everything you've got into any role you have, because you're going to get that much more out of it. You also never know who you are going to work with down the road. Be kind, work hard and stay humble.

My advice to young women entering this industry is to be gritty. Don't put yourself above anyone else. Do the grunt work. Really prove your worth through your work, your humility, and your kindness, and absorb everything. If different tasks are getting thrown at you, take them. Don't say no to opportunities and be the one that is showing up. Showing up is literally half the battle, and being hungry for knowledge and being curious is essential. The opportunities that have led me to being in New York, overseeing a U.S. expansion, came because I took risks in my 20s. I worked my butt off, I worked 3 jobs, and I never thought I was above a role if it was going to have me in an association that I was interested in. I really didn't have a career trajectory of wanting to be a certain executive at a certain time in my life. I really wanted to make an impact in women's lives, be a leader in some capacity, and expose myself to as many different opportunities as I could so I could figure out what I wanted to do. That allowed me to not have blinders on where I may have missed some of the opportunities that came my way, because I wasn't so focused on an end goal. I was focused on what type of person I wanted to be and what impact I wanted to make. I allowed opportunities to gravitate towards me based on that, but I also ran for the bus. I think that's really important for young girls stepping into this industry. It's a hard industry, it's a saturated industry. If you are gritty, resilient, open to opportunities, and have a clear vision of the person you want to be, not necessarily the title, but the person you want to be and the influence you want to have, you're going to attract the opportunities that are going to get you to where you should be.

I think the biggest opportunity right now is that while everything is digitized, which has pros and cons, people are looking for in-the-life connection, and that's essentially what we're built for. Businesses that serve anything in regards to hospitality really have the opportunity to nail the hospitality, nail the environment that their clients are coming into, because that is what is going to get clients to come back. When you have unreasonable hospitality, when you have the mindset that hospitality and customer service is not a one-size-fits-all, and you really gear it into your individual clients, you do your best to get to know your repeat clients and understand why they're coming back, and make that first experience special for first-time clients, that's the opportunity where you're going to build those clients for life. The biggest challenge my industry is facing is that because things are being digitized, especially when you're a larger corporation, the board is going to push for as fiscally responsible choices as you can make, and they're going to be pushing for a lot of automation, and that is going to take away from the human-to-human connection from a lot of these spaces. The biggest challenge is how do you integrate technology and efficiency without stripping away the soul from service-based experiences. Sometimes clients are coming in and they work remotely, their friends aren't in the city, they don't have family in the city, and they're very lonely in their day-to-day. When they're coming in to get their nails done, they're coming to connect with our technicians and our hospitality team. That might be their only social interaction for the week, and it's so meaningful to them. When you start to strip away the check-in process or automate things, they're losing that one piece of socialization that they're getting in a week that they're paying for. They're paying a premium to come have that experience, and now it's being taken away. The biggest opportunity is ensuring that your human-to-human connections with your clients are exaggerated and solidified, and the challenge is integrating technology without stripping away that experience.

Humility and integrity are the most important values to me. I think knowing that you can always learn something, that you should try to not be the smartest person in the room, is essential. Having the humility that you're going to learn something from everyone, regardless of what role they're in, is going to allow you to stay open to opportunities, to feedback, to answers to questions you didn't think were there. Just having humility in everything that you do is crucial. Integrity is equally important. If you have integrity with everything that you do, you're hopefully not going to make a wrong decision. How you show up in everything that you do, personal and work, is going to not only allow you to sleep at night, but it's also going to carry through your reputation, and I think that is something that's really, really important.