Success rarely follows the plan. One Culverhouse graduate thought a PhD was the only path to the career he wanted while another nearly walked away from accounting before her career even began. One turned down the only job offer he had before graduation and one left a promising legal career to build something that didn’t yet exist.
Each decision marked a turning point.
The recipients of this year’s Culverhouse Alumni Awards represent different industries, generations and career paths. But their journeys share a common lesson that growth often begins the moment a carefully constructed plan gives way to opportunity.
The First Step
For many graduates, the first years after college are filled with uncertainty.
Daniel Rodda didn’t have every step mapped out when he accepted a position as a quality assurance analyst with Hewitt Associates. The role introduced him to large organizations and complex projects, but one lesson arrived sooner than expected. Early in his career, he found himself training and managing colleagues who were often older and more experienced.
“Respect isn’t earned through a title or position,” Rodda said. “It’s earned through humility, preparation and treating people well while consistently delivering results.”
Alex Flachsbart’s first job looked nothing like the path many economics graduates envision. Through Teach For America, he taught high school geometry in Lowndes County while helping establish the program in Alabama. There, he witnessed firsthand what limited economic opportunity can mean for a community.
The experience shaped the rest of his career and he’s now founder and CEO of Opportunity Alabama, a nonprofit focused on generating economic development in Alabama distressed communities.
Neil Duthie, vice president of category management for Mars Petcare, entered the workforce with a long-term goal already in mind. Someday, he wanted to own a business. Inspired by consulting experiences in Culverhouse management courses, he intentionally chose a position with a small Atlanta advertising and print media company because he believed the lessons learned in a small business environment would serve him later.
For Lana English Sellers, the challenge began before she even landed her first job. One of fewer than five women in Alabama’s School of Accountancy during the mid-1970s, she encountered interviewers who made it clear many accounting firms were hiring women reluctantly.
Discouraged, she considered abandoning accounting and interviewing with Neiman Marcus instead.
Then professor John Mason intervened.
“He told me to take my name off the Neiman Marcus interview list and get a job, no matter how bad it was, with one of the ‘Big Eight’ accounting firms,” Sellers recalled.
She followed his advice, earning her CPA and starting a career that included accounting, venture capital, and manufacturing. She is president of Advanced Labelworx, Inc.
Meanwhile, Cade Warner’s path appeared remarkably clear. He completed three majors and a minor at Alabama, participated in multiple internships and continued directly into graduate school. His plan was to earn a PhD and pursue a career in investment management, but life had other plans.
The Pivot Point
Career defining moments rarely announce themselves. While completing graduate studies, Warner was already taking doctoral courses when mentors encouraged him to reconsider his future. After the birth of his first child, they advised him to enter the workforce rather than continue pursuing a PhD. He did so with reservations.
“I had it in my mind that I needed a PhD to get to a certain ultimate career position in the industry I was excited to work in,” said Warner, now CEO of The Westervelt Company. “Ultimately, I pivoted and I’m really glad I did that in hindsight.”
Rodda’s turning point came during an MBA internship with a major consulting firm. The role looked ideal on paper and aligned with the career path he thought he wanted. Instead, he realized the work wasn’t a good fit.
The disappointment was a valuable lesson and eventually steered him toward executive compensation consulting and a career that led him to Meridian Compensation Partners, where he now advises corporate boards and executive leadership teams.
For Duthie, a mentor’s advice changed everything. After two years in small business, a mentor at Coca-Cola encouraged him to move into consumer packaged goods and learn retail dynamics from the ground up. Duthie took the opportunity.
Several years later, he made another pivotal move, leaving a successful sales role at Kellogg’s to enter the emerging field of Category Management. The decision felt risky, but 25 years later after leadership roles at Kellogg’s and Mars Petcare, it is difficult to imagine his career taking any other path.
Sellers’ pivot may have been the boldest of all.
After reaching partnership at Coopers & Lybrand she walked away. A longtime client, entrepreneur John Harbert, had spent years challenging her assumptions about business and entrepreneurship. Inspired by his example and increasingly restless with the routine of public accounting, she left and started a venture capital fund with one financial backer. She did this despite having little experience in the field, which also had very few women.
“When I went to John’s office to tell him I was leaving Coopers & Lybrand to go into private equity/venture capital he snatched off his glasses and asked, ‘Why in the world are you doing that?’” Sellers recalled. “I replied, ‘I am following your advice, to see if I can maybe build a building or a bridge to offer more to society than being a paper pusher.’ He was for once totally startled and speechless finally responding, ‘But I did not mean that literally.’”
For Flachsbart, the turning point arrived through legislation.
While practicing law and working on economic development projects, he became frustrated by Alabama’s inability to access investment capital for many struggling communities. When Opportunity Zones were created in 2017, he recognized a chance to build something new. That idea became Opportunity Alabama, or OPAL.
The Pressure Test
Every successful career eventually encounters a moment when the future becomes uncertain again.
For Sellers, it arrived on her 40th birthday. Without warning, the financial backers of her venture fund announced they were shutting it down. Instead of retreating, Sellers drew upon the relationships and experience she built over two decades. She raised one of Alabama’s first private equity funds supported by multiple investors and later acquired Advanced Labelworx, a manufacturing company.
Warner’s challenge came when he became CEO of Westervelt at a relatively young age while navigating difficult market conditions and industry disruption.
“There was a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “I had never been in that role. It was a big shift up, and I knew the market environment was very uncertain at the time, and it was going to be kind of a dogfight for a while.”
His solution was to focus relentlessly on what he could control, rely on trusted advisors and build a team capable of weathering difficult conditions.
For Flachsbart, COVID-19 threatened the foundation of a business built on relationships and in-person collaboration. Years spent traveling Alabama and building an investment ecosystem suddenly seemed at risk. The disruption forced OPAL to reinvent itself.
Flachsbart now sees the pandemic as the catalyst that pushed the organization toward a more sustainable model and greater long-term impact.
Duthie encountered his own challenge after moving to Northwest Arkansas to support Kellogg’s Walmart business. The speed, scale, and complexity of the work were overwhelming.
Managing data within an $8 billion breakfast category often left little time for the strategic thinking he enjoyed most. Rather than become discouraged, he focused on improving his skills, learning new technologies and finding ways to work more efficiently.
“After many long nights, that effort paid off, and I have built a strong relationship with Walmart over the past 20 years,” Duthie said.
The Impact Phase
At some point, success stops being about personal achievement and starts becoming about influence.
Today, Warner leads The Westervelt Company, overseeing operations that span forestry, wood products manufacturing, environmental mitigation and real estate. Yet one of the lessons he now shares most often with students is that careers rarely unfold exactly as planned.
“It’s good to have a roadmap, but you need to maintain optionality and flexibility,” Warner said. “Because the world around us is evolving constantly and changing at a rapid pace. Your career path will never work out exactly like you intended it to. You have to be flexible and try to do the very best you can at a given point in time in the position that you’re in and not worry too much about where the future will go.”
Rodda has spent more than two decades helping organizations align executive compensation with long-term performance and governance goals. As a partner at Meridian Compensation Partners, he advises leaders at companies ranging from small-cap organizations to Fortune 50 enterprises. He says one of the most meaningful transitions came when several of his own mentors retired.
“You look around and realize you’ve become one of the more senior folks around,” Rodda said. “That can be quite an adjustment. It caused me to reflect on the role those mentors played in my career—not just teaching technical skills, but opening doors, giving me confidence, and encouraging me to take risks all while providing a safety net—and seek to pass that along to others as they develop in their careers.”
The realization inspired him to help younger professionals navigate the same decisions he once faced.
Duthie experienced a similar shift. After years spent developing technical expertise, leadership required something different: creating a vision that others could rally around.
Today, as vice president of category management for Mars Petcare and a leader in multiple industry associations, he focuses not only on strategy but also on helping others grow.
Flachsbart’s influence now extends beyond the projects OPAL helps bring to life. As the organization has grown, so has his commitment to helping students understand a corner of the business world he wishes he had discovered earlier. He regularly speaks with Culverhouse students about economic development, investment incentives and community revitalization, hoping to broaden their understanding of the opportunities available to them.
“The one thing I wish I had earlier at Alabama earlier was more exposure to the world that I’m in now. For example, I didn’t really even know that there was such a thing as a tax credit for helping revitalize a low-income place basically until law school. When I was in Tuscaloosa for the Alumni Awards ceremony, I talked for an hour and a half with a bunch of students. We talked about what the heck Opal does, what it is, and I’ve loved it. I’ll do that on repeat with whatever students that can tolerate it.
“I would love every one of them to have a base level understanding of what it is that this world looks like. It’s an additional tool in the toolkit, some more grounding that can ultimately help the next generation have a broader understanding of what the art of the possible is.”
Sellers has spent more than two decades leading Advanced Labelworx while drawing on lessons from every stage of her career from public accounting to venture capital to entrepreneurship.
Together, their careers demonstrate that leadership often emerges from experiences that once felt uncertain.
Full Circle
For the Alumni Award recipients, it’s the people and personal connections they made while at Culverhouse that has made the biggest impact on their career.
For Sellers, it was John Mason, the professor who convinced her to stay in accounting. Warner’s mentors helped him understand there was more than one path to success while Rodda’s mentors provided confidence, guidance and opportunities that shaped his career.
For Duthie, a mentor’s advice opened the door to an entirely new industry, and Flachsbart’s professors, classmates, and experiences at Alabama helped build the analytical foundation he still relies upon today.
Their industries are different. Their careers span more than five decades of business evolution. Their definitions of success vary.
Their stories point to the same conclusion that careers are not built through certainty. They are built through curiosity, resilience and the willingness to trust mentors, embrace risk, and adapt when the plan changes.
The Alumni Awards recognize where these graduates have arrived. Their journeys reveal that success is rarely a straight line. It is the result of having the courage to take the next step when the road unexpectedly turns.