Students, faculty and members of the Ogden community filled Gallery 51 at Ogden’s Union Station Wednesday to participate in this year’s Buehler Leadership Lecture.
Put on by Weber State University’s Goddard School of Business and Economics, the lecture featured Weber State alumnus and Swift Transportation Company president and CEO Jerry Moyes as the keynote speaker.
Event organizer and development director of the Goddard School of Business and Economics, Kabi Catalano explained why they selected Moyes to participate in the lecture.
“He started a business with his father in trucking and grew it to a $4.3 billion business in his lifetime,” said Catalano. “He has found great success, and I think it’s really important for Weber State students and the Ogden community to know that one of their own has pushed past perceived boundaries of what he could do.”
According to Catalano, Moyes is a “man in demand,” speaking around the world. As a result, it took nearly 8 months for the Goddard School of Business and Economics to set up a date for him to come.
When they were able to contact him, Catalano said that Moyes was “honored by the invitation.”
Before he addressed the audience, Moyes briefly outlined some of the points that he wanted to discuss in the lecture.
“I want to teach people things that they are not going to learn in business school, things that I have learned in the school of hard knocks,” Moyes said.
Within his lecture, Moyes described his experiences of establishing and building up Swift Transportation, starting with a beat-up truck and $10,000 in the late 1960s. He also spent some time reflecting on the struggles that he has had with the company, especially during the last economic recession.
Moyes also shared his thoughts with the audience regarding what he felt were the most important traits a person needs to have if they are going into a business career.
“You need to have a work ethic, and you have to work hard,” Moyes said. “Whether it’s to get that business, to keep that business or to simply get that job or promotion, you have got to work for it.”
After the lecture concluded, many audience members reflected on what they had heard and learned from Moyes’s lecture.
One such audience member was Tia Walker, a WSU junior studying business administration.
“It all goes back to customer service and treating your employees’s right,” Walker said. “The employees can apply to get money to go to certain charities that they want, so that is one thing that really stood out to me.”
Kym Buttschardt, owner of Roosters Brewing Company and the Union Grill, also attended the lecture.
“I appreciated his candor with the economy and his discussion of personal and family challenges,” Buttschardt said. “He has this multi-billion dollar company, but he is a real person, and I appreciate real people who have real challenges, who solve real problems and who like to go to work and serve their customers, the public and their employees.”
