Excerpt from the article: At the Top of Their Game by Laurie Wink.
Women executives excel at juggling career and family responsibilities.
Mary Lewis sees her career and motherhood as equally important parts of her identity. Until mid-June, she was vice president of administration and chief financial officer for Lakeshore Public Media, with responsibility for all finance and accounting procedures; compliance with corporate, state and federal grants; annual financial reports and audits; and management of the human resources office.
She left the position to become accounting manager for In Good Company Management Services, a company that manages 27 top-rated rental communities. She says IGC partners Jonathan Hicks and Michael Sakich are hands-on owners. “They're proud of their reputation and they're very philanthropic.”
Lewis earned an accounting degree from Northern Michigan University and worked for several CPA firms. After her husband Michael earned an MBA in 1987, he began a career in finance with Procter & Gamble. As his career took off, the couple made a series of moves, first to a small town in Florida, then to Memphis, Cincinnati and Iowa City.
With a growing family–the couple has two sons and a daughter–Lewis wanted to be with her kids after school and enjoy their extracurricular activities. So she worked a series of part-time jobs, including selling Mary Kay cosmetics, teaching aerobics classes and providing bookkeeping services to businesses. But she also felt a strong tug toward the work world and missed the intellectual stimulation. “It's that craving for knowledge that I was not getting,” she says. “I would see my husband dressed in a suit and tie going to work at this big company every day, and I really envied the fact that he got to do this all the time.”
The family moved to Crown Point in 1996, and Lewis set a goal of returning to her career when her youngest son graduated from high school in 2006. That's exactly what she did, getting hired by Lakeshore Public Media as the station accountant in August 2006. Five months later, she was promoted to business manager and, as the nonprofit company grew, she moved into higher level executive positions.
True to her roots in accounting, Lewis is adept at balancing debits and credits in her life ledger and says success is not about the bottom line of money and prestige.
“I would say you need to go into what makes you happy,” she says. “You're going to be working a long time and life is short. You need to be proud of what you're doing. If you're not doing that, you're in the wrong field.”
