Crystal Maggalet grew up in a home where she saw her mom and dad be very entrepreneurial. To them, it was an opportunity to jump in and do it. That’s where she got her early start to become what she is today: CEO of FJ Management and Maverik.
Maggalet was the guest speaker at the new Leaders of Utah Documentary (L.O.U.D.) networking series held at the Young Automotive Group’s headquarters May 13.
The primary goal of this series is to provide Utah’s next wave of leaders with avenues for professional development, said Oliver Young, innovations director at the Young Automotive Group. “This series is designed for people looking to gain insights, make meaningful connections and grow their business.”
Maggalet’s father is the late Flying J founder, O. Jay Call. She got her start in the family business after receiving a bachelor’s in marketing from Pepperdine University. “I came back and worked for our family business,” she said. “I marketed propane and butane for our refinery as well as managed a fleet of our cars. Then I decided to go back and get my MBA and went to Harvard Business School.”
With her degree in hand, Maggalet decided she wanted to stay back east for a little bit. “I worked in Stamford, Connecticut, in marketing for a credit card company,” she said. “After a couple of years of doing that, my father came to me and said he wanted to build a hotel in Salt Lake and would I be interested in coming back and leading that charge.”
Maggalet said although her dad was very entrepreneurial, he was very hands-off. “I knew that was an amazing opportunity for me, so I came back to Salt Lake and started building hotels. I always believed in hard work and I was a staff of one when I started the hotel. I had to pick sheets and figure out account systems. I had to decorate the hotel and line up reservations.”
Maggalet said she was not leading; she was doing. “I learned very quickly that there’s no way I could do that. I definitely think Crystal Inn was the first opportunity I had to do that. I made mistakes. Some of the first people that I hired weren’t the right people.”
As the hotel chain grew, Maggalet said, some of the employees weren’t the right people anymore, even though they were when she started. “Being an entrepreneur, that was a wonderful opportunity to experience something from starting up, where you have to do everything to progress to where I am today, where everybody does everything for me. That’s true leadership.”
At the very beginning of COVID, the hotels were in a really desperate situation. Hotels had just gone close to 90 days of the year doing really well in occupancy and revenue and then COVID hit. Occupancy went from 75 percent to 15 percent in a matter of a week. However, Maggalet was able to maintain her drive as a leader to push the organization forward.
“In the end, managing about 14 hotels, along the way I had four kids,” said Maggalet. “I had a break there of about eight years where I was not working as much and during that time I was on the board of Flying J, which was my father’s company.”
Maggalet was still involved with Crystal Inn in 2008 during the Great Recession. “My dad passed away,” she said. “Flying J went into bankruptcy and within three weeks I was CEO of Flying J.”
Stepping in as CEO of Flying J in early 2009 when it was in bankruptcy, there was a lot to do, said Maggalet. “We were a fully integrated oil company. We weren’t that anymore. We went from 12,000 employees to 1,000 and somebody else operating the main part of our company. We were minority owners, so we still participated on the board and things, but I definitely was lost.”
Maggalet said she had all these people around her that knew all about bankruptcy, attorneys and consultants. “I didn’t know anything about bankruptcy. I really had to have the courage to be a leader because they would have plowed over me.”
Maggalet was advised that she didn’t have to pay everything back to the creditors. “I had the people around me, we had the assets,” she said. “We can come out and pay people back and I wanted to make this happen. Along the way, people would say, ‘Why would you pay everybody back? You don’t have to do that.’ I had to do that.”
That was the duty piece, said Maggalet. “The leadership piece was necessary to bring really smart people together on the same page. All of a sudden, a lot of really smart people went away because they were there for the bankruptcy and we were out and we were in great shape.”
After that, Maggalet said, she wondered where to go from there. “Buying Maverik a year and a half later was a very easy decision. We had the resources to do it.”
Maggalet has been the CEO of Maverik and FJ Management ever since. “We changed the name (from Flying J) to FJ Management. FJ Management is a holding company and that’s Maverik but also owns a refinery and has a large investment portfolio of assisted living centers, hotels, banks and a few other things.”
Primarily today, Maggalet is CEO of Maverik. “We have 840 convenience stores across 20 states,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t just give up and feel like, ‘Well, our family business will never be the same’ because today we’re back to where we have actually more employees and do much better on the bottom line than Flying J ever did, which makes me very proud.”
To reserve a spot for the next L.O.U.D. networking installment featuring Gov. Spencer Cox, go to https://wkf.ms/49eMjXT.