2013

7th Year Anniversary

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2013 executive women in business

pReviOuS hONOReeS aNd judgeS**

2007 hONOReeS

Marge connelly, Wachovia SecuritiesMichelle gluck, LandAmericaeva Teig hardy, Dominion

2008 hONOReeS

Katherine e. Busser, Capital Onelyn Mcdermid, Dominionerika davis, Owens & Minor

2009 hONOReeS

grace den hartog, Owens & Minorlinda Schreiner, MeadWestvaco FoundationBonnie Shelor, Bon Secours Virginia Health System

2010 hONOReeS

Mary doswell, Dominionlinda Nash, PartnerMDSusan dewey, VA Housing Development Authority

2011 hONOReeS

gail letts, SunTrust, Central Virginiajudy pahren, Capital One Financial CorporationMargaret g. lewis, HCA Capital Division

2012 hONOReeS

Ting Xu, Evergreen Enterprises and Plow & Hearth LLCKathleen Maccio holman, Davenport & Company LLCTonya Mallory, Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc.

SelecTiON paNel judgeS

Scott Bass, News Editor, Style Weekly, 2007pam Belleman, Partner, Troutman Sanders, 2007Brand Meyer, President, Financial Services Group of Wachovia Securities, 2007laura Freitag, Partner, Ernst & Young, 2007-2008victor Branch, Senior Vice President, Bank of America, 2007-2008, 2010-2011Thomas chewning, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Dominion, 2007lori c. Waran, Publisher, Style Weekly, 2008-2012eva Teig hardy, Executive VP for External Affairs and Corporate Communications, Dominion, 2008Michelle gluck, Executive VP, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, LandAmerica, 2008jill Webb, Partner, Troutman Sanders, 2008-2010julie ehlers, Director of Marketing & External Relations, Robins School of Business, 2009Brian jackson, General Counsel, Ukrop’s, 2009paula g. Mahan, U.S. Trust, Bank of America, 2009andrea childress, Partner, Ernst & Young, 2009john a. luke, jr., Chairman and CEO, MeadWestvaco, 2010-2012chip phillips, Richmond Managing Partner, Ernst & Young, 2010-2012jan Rice, Executive Director, ACG Richmond, 2010erika davis, Senior Vice President Human Resources, Owens and Minor, 2011-2012evelyn S. Traub, Practice Group Leader, Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation, Troutman Sanders, 2011-2012

**Titles and positions current as of corresponding year’s program.

2013 executive Women in Business achievement awards Selection panel: Chip Phillips, Richmond Managing Partner, Ernst & Young; Victor Branch, Senior Vice President, Bank of America; Evelyn S. Traub, Practice Group Leader, Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation, Troutman Sanders; John A. Luke, Jr., Chairman and CEO, MeadWestvaco; Lori C. Waran, Publisher, Style Weekly

Special pROMOTiON

2013 is the year of leaning in. It’s the year of professional women pushing harder, working smarter and relentlessly pursuing their ambitions. And of women asking themselves how exactly they can do all that while filling other essential roles: as wives, mothers, coaches and community servants.

This year’s Executive Women in Business honorees exemplify that balance. All are respected leaders and bold executives who care deeply about their employees, their customers and their community.

Beth Rilee-Kelley, chief operating officer of The Martin Agency, climbed the ranks of the famously competitive agency by never hesitating to leap into new leadership roles. She’s also, in the words of agency President Mike Hughes, “the boss everyone wants to have” — a warm and encouraging mentor.

Mary anne graf, vice president of women’s services for the Bon Secours Virginia Health System, is a far-sighted strategist who transformed

the hospitals’ obstetrics programs for a new generation of women. She never loses sight of the goal she’s had for decades: to help women have a joyful and successful birth experience.

debbie johnston, president and owner of home healthcare provider Care Advantage Inc., oversees 3,000 employees and 14 offices and affiliates across

Virginia. Yet she makes time to contribute to a staggering array of community causes, including cancer fundraisers, support for victims of domestic violence and cleft-palate repair for children.

Johnston’s nurses provided home care for Graf’s mother until she died recently at the age of 98. “They were extraordinary,” Graf says. “Absolutely extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary” is a fitting word, too, to describe this year’s three honorees. Sponsors Ernst & Young, Troutman Sanders and Style Weekly would like to thank the judges and congratulate the winners of the 2013 Executive Women in Business Awards.

Leaning In and Giving Back

Beth Rilee-Kelley had worked on the account management side at The Martin Agency for 14 years when Mike Hughes, then the

agency’s president and executive creative director, approached her one Friday afternoon in 1997. “I want to change your life,” he said. He asked Rilee-Kelley to take over his management duties and become director of creative resources.

Rilee-Kelley knew that managing writers and art directors would be quite different from leading account execs. But she didn’t hesitate to leap over the chasm.

Rilee-Kelley led the department for seven years. Hughes once told her, “Beth, I want you to master the job you’re in, train your replacement, then move onto another area of the company that needs you.” She took that advice to heart. While still leading creative, she later replanted one foot in account management, assisting the new director of that department, then in 2004 volunteered to serve as interim director of human resources. She held that position for five years.

Now she’s partner and chief operating officer, a role that encompasses every facet of the agency from legal to IT to financial. It’s a role that suits Rilee-Kelley’s go-go-go nature well. When she was a girl, her father nicknamed her “Miss Full Charge.”

Yet she manages to stay balanced. She and her husband Paul have always believed in a 50-50 split of parental duties. Still, Rilee-Kelley says, early on in her career she held herself to too-high standards. “I learned to ease up on myself a little bit,” she says. “And when I did that, I think I became better all the way around” — as a professional, a mother and a wife.

She helps her employees relax and refocus too.

Recently, she says, she had an employee come to see her who was “just seething, just so upset about things and frustrated.” Who have you told about this? Rilee-Kelley asked. “I’ve told no one,” the employee admitted. “Because I was hoping I could do it.” They talked about what could be done to lighten the employee’s workload and get her back to doing what she enjoyed.

Rilee-Kelley willingly serves as coach to anyone who asks her, and has helped guide young professionals in other professions through Mentor Richmond. “I love seeing people be the best they

can be,’” she says. “Years ago, two guys took a chance on me.”

advice FOR WOMeN WhO aSpiRe TO eXecuTive pOSiTiONS:[Mike Hughes and Chairman John Adams] always said to me, throughout my career, ‘Don’t ever let yourself get bored. If you get bored, raise your hand, and tell us. Or better yet, come and tell us what you want to do.’ And I took that to heart, and I have used that my entire career.

2013 executive women in business

BETH RILEE-KELLEYchieF OpeRaTiNg OFFiceR, The MaRTiN ageNcyCommunity involvement: Advisory board member for the VCU School of Mass Communications, past co-chair of the agency’s diversity committee, sponsor of the Martin Makes a Difference charitable giving effort

Husband Paul Kelley; daughter Breeden, 24, and son Tee, 17

Special pROMOTiON

as an operating-room nurse, Debbie Johnston had a frontline view of the health-care system. And what she saw

troubled her. “Because I just saw patients going home really sick,” she says. “Quick.”

She wanted to start her own company to provide skilled, professional healthcare and nursing care to patients in their homes. She hesitated to take the leap, but her mentor, lawyer Buddy Allen, made her do it: “He believed more in me than I believed in me,” she says.

In 1988, Johnston founded Care Advantage. Twenty-five years later, that company and two others — Nurse Advantage and All About Care — have 3,000 employees and 14 offices and affiliates throughout Virginia. She wrote a book about her entrepreneurial experience called “The School of Heart Knocks.”

Being a successful business owner isn’t easy, Johnston says. “You have to have passion for what you’re doing. And you have to be good to your people.” She recognizes that nursing is a demanding profession, and so rewards her staff with incentives ranging from prizes and parties to a vacation twice a year for the staff of the office that grows the most. Care Advantage also offers employees nursing scholarships in honor of Helen Lindsey, a talented nurse who worked for Johnston before losing all four limbs to bacterial meningitis.

Not only does her company care about its staff and clients, but Johnston helps people in need in ways too numerous to list. One of her beloved causes is Smile Train, the nonprofit that repairs children’s cleft palates. She became interested in its mission back in her nursing days, after meeting a 7-year-old girl with a cleft palate. The girl, Johnston remembers, drew a picture of her

beautiful family — and drew herself as a monster. “And that little patient never left me. That impression never went away.”

In the Richmond area, Johnston has donated TV airtime on WRIC Channel 8’s “Showcase Richmond” to a long list of nonprofits and personally participates in dozens of fundraisers. Last year the YWCA dedicated its support room for victims of domestic and sexual violence to Johnston, to thank her for her support.

In 2011, Johnston took her commitment to charity one step further. She agreed to appear in an episode of “Secret Millionaire,” an ABC reality show that follows wealthy people as they live undercover in poor communities. At the end

of a week, they reveal their identities and donate money to local heroes. Johnston lived in a tough neighborhood in Richmond, Calif., which she says was an incredible and humbling experience. “Do you know how hard it is to eat off $32 a week?” she says. “When you live through something like that, you don’t forget it. You really don’t.” The episode is scheduled to air later this summer.

advice FOR WOMeN WhO aSpiRe TO eXecuTive pOSiTiONS:“It’s not easy. You have to have passion for what you’re doing. And you have to be good to your people. ... People say, “What’s [behind] your success?” ... It’s about my people. It’s not just about me.”

DEBBIE JOHNSTONpReSideNT aNd OWNeR, caRe advaNTage iNc.Community involvement: Member of the board of J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, chair of the American Cancer Society’s 2012 Cure By Design fundraiser, “Secret Millionaire” participant

2013 executive women in business

Special pROMOTiON

2013 executive women in business

Mary Anne Graf loves babies. You can see it in her face as she cradles one-day-old Ella Grace, one of the newest arrivals at Bon

Secours St. Mary’s Hospital. Graf’s own birth experience was a tragic one:

Her daughter was stillborn. “And it shouldn’t have happened,” she says. So she dedicated her career to ensuring that other women’s births would be joyful.

“What makes a joyful birth is the mother being successful,” Graf says. “And it doesn’t matter what that success is.” Whether a labor is arduous or easy, whether a baby comes early or late, the mother should feel she made the right decisions.

Trained as a certified nurse-midwife, Graf opened

a Utah birth center that was the largest in the United States. “We had wonderful births there,” she says. “But what I wanted to do was keep spreading wonderful births.”

In 1985 she founded Health Care Innovations and HCI Market Research Group, companies that guided hundreds of hospitals and medical centers through the process of improving their obstetric programs and other services. Graf has also authored two books about strategies for delivering superior healthcare for women.

In 2001, she joined Bon Secours as vice president of women’s and children’s services for all seven Bon Secours hospitals in Virginia. Graf oversaw the

renovation of facilities, the recruitment of obstetric and pediatric specialists and the creation of secure Internet access to infants in neonatal intensive care. She was instrumental in updating Bon Secours’ outdated classes — “classes that were perfect for every 55-year-old who’s pregnant,” she jokes — and creating the largest prenatal education program in the nation.

During Graf’s tenure, annual births at Bon Secours in Richmond have nearly tripled. She is constantly looking ahead to plan for how Bon Secours will serve the next generation, speaking excitedly about adapting to the needs of digital natives.

Her role as a manager, she believes, is to educate Bon Secours employees so that they can move into new roles — even if that sometimes means losing them. She’s particularly proud of a member of her staff who arrived as a nursing director. Graf gave her the chance to plan healthcare strategy across multiple hospitals. As a result, that employee just got a job offer as a vice president of nursing at a hospital out of state. “She was ready for something new, and she got it,” Graf says. “That’s great.”

advice FOR WOMeN WhO aSpiRe TO eXecuTive pOSiTiONS:“One is to lean in. But the other one is to relax about it. You don’t have to do everything at once. One of the best things about being a woman is that it’s still OK for women to pull out of one and go into another. It’s not OK yet for men to say, ‘I’m going to take five years off and be a parent.’ ... From my perspective, you can have it all, but you don’t have it at the same time.”

MARY ANNE GRAFvice pReSideNT OF WOMeN’S SeRviceS, BON SecOuRS viRgiNia healTh SySTeMCommunity involvement: Chair of strategic planning for board of Children’s Museum of Richmond; board of Central Virginia Health Network; brought the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women to Richmond

Married to Paul Graf; two sons, Michael, 24, and Ryan, 20

Special pROMOTiON

No matter how di�cult the climb, the goal is to never give up.

Troutman Sanders Congratulates the 2013 Executive Women in Business Honorees

You are an inspiration.John West Richmond O�ce Managing Partner 804.697.1200 600 lawyers troutmansanders.com