Vicki Hayes

I had a couple of really, really good mentors at BH Media who would push me, kicking and screaming, to the next level. You know, I'd get very comfortable doing what I was doing, and they would give me a little more responsibility, and I'd push back on that. Then I'd get a promotion, and they'd give me more responsibility. They definitely just put their foot in the middle of my back and kept pushing me forward. I didn't realize at the time what a great gift they were giving me, but they did. It started when I was substitute teaching and one of the ladies I worked with said her brother-in-law was the publisher of the local newspaper. I interviewed and was supposed to start the week between Christmas and New Year's, but on December 23rd, myself, my two daughters, and my two oldest grandchildren were involved in a really, really, really bad car accident. We were in intensive care - one of my daughters and myself - and my granddaughter was in the hospital. It was pretty bad. My husband called the publisher and the ad director and said Vicki understood that when you have an open sales position, it's costing you money, so please fill it. And they said no, we're holding the job, we think Vicki is the person for the job. You know, why wouldn't you want to work for people like that? One of the publishers, who was not one to give out compliments, said when I left to move to Texas that we often asked Vicki to do things without a roadmap, and she would just have to figure it out. And she, without fail, would figure it out and make it successful. I said, did that hurt a little bit? He goes, yeah, a little bit. I hate doing that compliment.

It would have to be from those two gentlemen that I mentioned. They said, the only person that doesn't believe in you and your abilities is you. Everybody else around you sees it. You know, what can we do to help you see it? They said, you just think you're doing your job, but you do more than that. You just don't really realize how much you do.

Well, it's a lot different now than it was when I was starting, because when I was starting out, it was a boys club, especially in publishing, so I was very often the only girl at the table. But nowadays, it's different. There are more females in this industry than there have been, ever. Just work hard, keep your eye on the prize, whatever that prize is for you, whether it's aspiring to be a publisher, or whether it's aspiring to be the president of the company. Just keep your eye on that, and just take baby steps, but you'll get there.

Well, just because we partner mostly with newspapers, and newspapers have been kind of a - I wouldn't say dying breed, but newspapers as we know them with an actual newspaper is becoming a thing of the past. But they are kind of like Madonna, they have to reinvent themselves. So now they're all about digital. So much of the world is a digital world now, but there's something to be said for the analog piece of it. So the biggest challenge is everything is moving to a digital platform.

I think family is the number one priority, which is one of the great things that really kind of keeps me going here at Hometown Welcome. It's a smaller company, but our owner is very hands-on and also very family first mentality, which is great. And now I have a very nice work-life balance that I maybe did not have as much of before. So the values of family - it's number one, everything else is just stuff.