Behind every successful CEO, there is an organized, trustworthy and dependable executive assistant who can multitask a variety of projects, schedules and personalities. These assistants have the ability to maintain a serene calmness in a sea of chaos and are flexible, and they enjoy the sudden shift in gears that goes along with managing high-profile executives.
They’re creative, tenacious and confident about their abilities, and almost always, they stay behind the scenes. They are the ones in charge of scheduling an interview, not being interviewed. But Business Report tracked down some of the busiest assistants in the Capital City to see what life is like for these gatekeepers and what’s it like to work for the boss.
Among those highlighted in the new issue are Shannon Guidry, executive assistant to Raising Cane’s founder and CEO Todd Graves, who says she knew she wanted to work for Graves the moment she met him for an interview and he suggested they take a walk, grab a cup of coffee and chat to enjoy the beautiful fall weather.
“He made me feel very relaxed,” says Guidry, 34. “And chatting outside over coffee instead of in the office removed a lot of barriers.”
Guidry has been working for Graves for nearly a year, managing the constantly changing schedule of the entrepreneur, who is worth between a reported $60 million and $80 million.
She fields emails, schedules his meetings and books his travel, which is one of the busiest aspects of the job. During the first two weeks of September, Graves had “jumped on a plane 15 or 20 times,” she says.
“His travel is really intense,” Guidry says. “So managing that is challenging. He has so many moving parts in any given moment of the day, and there’s no typical day. But it’s great working for him because he knows what hard work is. He is very detail-oriented and organized, and you can still see that fry cook in him.”
Fourteen years ago, Tara Saxon applied for an administrative job at Cajun Industries. Today, she is executive assistant to Chairman Emeritus Lane Grigsby and four other top executives. On the first day of work, she was overwhelmed, undertrained and didn’t think she had the chops to meet Grigsby’s expectations.
“I didn’t have anyone to train me for the first two weeks, so I was there going through files and trying to familiarize myself when Lane came in and told me about how he liked his coffee and how I had to call him one hour before he had to meet with someone to remind him,” she says. “He had this larger-than-life personality and at lunch time, I called my husband and said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ It took me awhile to realize they had me in charge and I had to get over feeling that I was overstepping my boundaries. And the more I did, the more I wanted to do and the more they realized I could do. After about a year, I thought I could never see myself anywhere else.”
Read the full feature, which also includes profiles of Jane Swift, Lauren Haro and Kristen Manske, assistants to Varsity Sports CEO Jenni Peters; as well as Ashley Arceneaux, director of presidential and policy communications for LSU President F. King Alexander; Renee Erwin, executive assistant to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center CEO K. Scott Wester; and Rheba Robertson, senior management assistant to Provident Resources Group CEO Steve Hicks. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
