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Stanford Business magazine

 

Career Shift

Early Executive, Late Bloomer

Karol Emmerich

Karol Emmerich, MBA '71, in her Minnesota greenhouse where she creates hybrid daylilies.

By Margaret Steen

Karol Emmerich graduated in the top 10 percent of her MBA class in 1971 and rose to the top finance position at Dayton Hudson by the early 1990s. But she had known since her student days that she wanted her life to be about more than making money.

During a career and life planning class at the GSB, Emmerich and her husband, Dick Emmerich, MBA ’72, mapped out their future: They would work hard for five years, living so frugally that they could save enough money to retire. Then they would move to the California forest and raise five children while doing nonprofit work and managing their money.

Karol Emmerich’s life hasn’t turned out exactly as she planned. But she did ultimately leave a blossoming career in search of a way to better live her Christian faith. And today, in the “sweaty physical labor” of raising daylilies in Minnesota, Emmerich has found a calling that is part business, part hobby, and part ministry.

“I’ve never been as happy, ever,” she said one recent spring day.

Emmerich’s parents provided models for two important aspects of her life: Although they didn’t have a lot of money to give away—she is the oldest of four daughters and her father worked for government contractors as a nuclear physicist—they were “generous with their giving,” she said. And Emmerich saw what a two-career family looked like when her mother, an architect, went back to work when Emmerich was a teenager.

Karol and Dick met at Northwestern, graduated and married in 1969, and Karol, a math major, started at the GSB that fall. Dick, whose hopes for a career playing professional football were dashed by a medical problem, was admitted the following year.

Karol was drawn to her husband and his family partly because they seemed at peace with themselves in a way that she was not. She wanted to “catch” what they had, she said, which turned out to be a deep, nondenominational evangelical Christian faith.

“I read the Bible cover to cover through grad school,” she said. “By the time I was done, I knew it was true.” Still, she said, she was not ready to give up control of her life to God. The turning point came a couple of months before she graduated, when she found that despite her stellar academic record, many companies simply did not want to hire a woman. Her husband still had a year of business school left, and she needed a job. When she decided to stop worrying and turn to God instead, she said, she felt “a wonderful peace.” And soon after she got a job offer from the Bank of America.

When Dick graduated from the GSB, the couple decided they had moved more as children than they liked, and so they wanted to find a place where they could build careers without moving around. Because his job offers were faster in coming than hers, they evaluated the cities where he could work and chose Minneapolis, a place where Karol seemed likely to find a job and that allowed them to return to their Midwestern roots. Shortly after they moved there in 1972, Karol got a job at Dayton Hudson (now Target Corp.).

Their five-year plan didn’t pan out, partly because both careers took off: While Karol was climbing the corporate ladder to vice president, treasurer, and chief accounting officer, Dick worked for IDS, then Cargill. Later he was the senior founding partner in a hedge fund company.

The Emmerichs donated money equal to Karol’s take-home pay, often in the form of stock options, and although they didn’t save enough to retire in five years, considering their incomes, they lived relatively frugally—and still do. Karol still collects coupons, Dick said, and they fly coach. “It has nothing to do with what you can afford,” Dick Emmerich said. “It’s about how you wisely steward what you have.”

Still, there were trade-offs. They had one son, Jim, born in 1979. The pressures of their careers—Dick’s work took him out of the country for long stretches—kept them from having even a second child. “It was all I could do to manage one,” Karol said. “I wanted a little girl, but I couldn’t figure out the logistics of it.”

Emmerich with flowersIn the summer of 1992, she took a six-week sabbatical to work in her garden and travel to Europe. On a layover in Detroit on her way back, she called colleague Jo Bogdan to check on work. “It’s still very vivid in my mind,” Bogdan said. “As I talked to her, her voice and tone were so different, like a butterfly floating. She spent half an hour telling me about all the beautiful gardens she had seen.”

Emmerich considered leaving her executive job, but she worried about giving up the money, as well as the platform and respect that success in business had brought. How would she answer, she wondered, when people asked, “What do you do?”

The answer came gradually. She left Dayton Hudson in 1993 and spent the next few years doing volunteer work and developing a 1.5-acre garden at her home in Edina. The garden served as a “stunningly beautiful” location for the brainstorming sessions she had with people who had heard about her decision to step down at the pinnacle of her career and wanted to reassess their own direction. “They figured I had a secret,” Emmerich said. “Why would I leave the perfect job?”

She brainstormed with the people who came to her—mostly women with senior corporate jobs, and later the heads of nonprofit organizations—about what they wanted to do and how they could go about it. For some, the relaxing atmosphere of the garden made it easier to discuss the spiritual aspect to their quest; for others, the talk was strictly business. “They would always know where the faith was in my life,” Emmerich said. “But if they weren’t comfortable talking about that, that was fine.”

Emmerich was also devoting a lot of energy to nonprofits. She helped the local United Way with its major giving campaign and joined the boards of Opportunity International, a Christian nonprofit that provides small loans to the world’s poor, and The Gathering and Royal Treasure, two groups for evangelical Christian philanthropists. She also kept ties to the corporate world by serving on corporate boards and keeping connections with friends like Bogdan, who called her both “a great boss” and “a terrific mentor.”

“I was feeling more fulfilled, but it still was somebody else’s deal,” Emmerich said. Meanwhile, her garden had grown to 1,000 daylilies. When someone suggested she could learn to breed her own, she thought that would be a good hobby and “jumped into it whole hog.” She spent three months a year for three years in Alabama learning from an expert. “I loved even my first attempts, the creative aspect of it,” she said, but she wanted the work to have “a greater purpose” as well, for the flowers to be both “drop-dead gorgeous” and “honoring to my faith.”

Today, she breeds daylilies that can survive in northern climates and have biblically inspired names like “Go in Peace” and “Be Fruitful and Multiply.” She sells between 600 and 700 plants per year, for $50 to $250 apiece. “Making them pretty and hardy is the challenge,” she said. The Emmerichs built a greenhouse in the country about 30 minutes from their city home and now spend much of their time there. The site includes a home built in 1862, which they are restoring. Their son, Jim, runs a paintball business next door.

Although she started with the daylilies in 1997, Emmerich didn’t sell any until 2003. “It’s like being in the wine business: It takes years and years and years to build your vineyard up before you actually produce good wine,” she said. Her daylily business, Springwood Gardens, “is just starting to roll now. It’s very small at the front end.”

Emmerich treats her new occupation like a business and hopes to eventually double the number of plants she sells. But profit is not her overriding motivation. She sells only her own creations, not flowers introduced by others, which limits her sales. The business has high overhead costs, including the state-of-the-art greenhouse—and heating it during the winter. And when she got a letter from a gardener who couldn’t afford a costly plant but loved the daylily called “Mighty Fortress” because it reminded her of her grandmother, Emmerich sent her one anyway. “From an IRS standpoint I have to run it like a business, but to me it’s really a ministry,” Emmerich said.

Emmerich’s faith surprised some of her former business colleagues, Bogdan said. “It’s more her actions. She really doesn’t talk about it that much.”

“I think the business world and the high-net-worth world inhibit being more open about your faith,” Dick Emmerich said. His wife’s sense of purpose has “deepened with the passage of time.”

“She’s become a happier, gentler person. We’ve been married for almost 40 years now. It’s been amazing to watch.”