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In grade school, Sue Anne Kleinpeter Cox was given an assignment: Teach yourself how to spell a word, any word of your choice. Her mother suggested she learn a word that was important to her. The first thing Sue Anne came up with? Family. As chief financial officer of fourth generation family-owned Kleinpeter Farms Dairy, this anecdote is not only fitting, it’s engrained.

“As a little girl I never thought I would be running a multimillion-dollar company,” she says. “I never thought of it in that respect. I always knew I wanted to remain with family.”

Any calf-feeding excursions aside, Cox officially began working at Kleinpeter in 1977. After seven years of work, a marriage and night classes in accounting and programming, she left to pursue full-time education at LSU. In her second semester, she took the new role of being a full-time mom. About two years later, she got a phone call from her father, Ben Kleinpeter. He was about to buy the dairy from his brothers and was going to need a bookkeeper.

Painful as it was to put her son in day care, Cox accepted her father’s invitation and went back to work in the only avenue she could imagine: with family. In a male dominated industry, it especially comforted her to know she was continuing a legacy of female involvement. Her grandmother and one of her aunts had previously held her position.

“I had no idea what we were getting into,” she admits.

What she got into was helping to rebuild the family business. She took her love of numbers and her interest in computer programming and hit the ground running, making programs to create efficiency where she could in payroll, federal reports and route data. In the early 1990s, Kleinpeter purchased its first handheld computers for route men. Cox worked behind the scenes building the database and coordinating programs.

“We had no IT department. There was no such thing back then,” she says. “I became the IT department.”

Even with the introduction of an IT department, Cox hasn’t slowed down. She and her team successfully completed the jokingly dubbed “The Cow Jumped Over the Moon” project, which involved writing their own software to create real-time processing of sales and receivables. Throw in back-to-back devastating hurricanes and the creation of a whole new division for ice cream and you have one busy woman.

Yet she still makes time for her family and the greater family of the community. She’s a board member of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Baton Rouge and is currently the vice chairman. She is also on the advisory board for Teens as Leaders, helping to further foster leadership and effect good things in the community. Following in the bank board footsteps of her father and her Aunt Weenie, Cox is on the board of Business First Bank. She’s one of three women on the board and is fairly certain “the world stopped for 10 seconds” when Buddy Roemer offered her the spot.

“I like being in the background, doing my thing,” she says. “You’re just there for people. That’s what you do. Not just caring about your family, but your whole community. We have to keep this company going so we can continue to do that.”