Leisa: Hello, I’m Leisa Holland Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things. My guest today is Jill Griffin, Author and Corporate Board Director; Jill, welcome to Women Mean Business.
Jill: Thank you so much Leisa, glad to be here.
Leisa: You might have wanted to be an author when you were a little kid in the backyard but my guess is you didn’t’ even know what a Corporate Board Director was.
Jill: That’s true. I did know in the third grade that I wanted to be in business.
Leisa: Okay, business, but Board Director – I mean what you’re doing now, how did you get to be doing this?
Jill: Well the way I got my board seat was when my first book on customer loyalty came out, out of the blue I got a telephone call from Red McCombs and Red McCombs says Professor Griffin – now I was teaching at UT at the time but I wasn’t a professor, I was a lecturer – but Mr. McCombs said Professor Griffin, I have just read the first chapter of your book Customer Loyalty. And he says I’m in the car business – now, a very humble statement – and he said I’ve always known that these J.D. Powell ratings, something wasn’t quite right about those but I didn’t know what was missing. And he said I read the first chapter of your book and now I understand, it’s not about customer satisfaction, it’s about customer loyalty.
And so he and I struck up a friendship and when the second edition of Customer Loyalty was ready I went to him, he connected me with General Robert Harris at USAA who wrote my Forward; a wonderful Forward about the continental army and George Washington, his definition of loyalty. And so General Harris and I got to be friends and General Harris was also the chairman of Luby’s and there was a board seat opening and he nominated me for that. So that was the path.
Leisa: So one of my favorite things to say is that you are who you are, wherever you are.
Jill: Yes.
Leisa: And that is exactly what happened to you.
Jill: That’s exactly right.
Leisa: I mean it wasn’t even the right spot – the right place at the right time – you were the right person for a need that they had and you happened to meet them.
Jill: Yes.
Leisa: Fabulous.
Jill: Preparation meets luck if you will.
Leisa: Terrific, thank you very much.
Jill: Thank you.
Leisa: There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things. I’m Leisa Holland Nelson, President and Co-founder of ContentActive, Houston’s leading web and mobile technology company. You can find me at ContactActive.com or follow me on Twitter @LHNelson. We’ll be back again next week with another edition of Women Mean Business.
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