Meet Leigh Ann Schultz
Former Director Leigh Ann Schultz talks about her approach to completing an endurance event in Antarctica
It’s a slippery slope from the D.C. suburbs to a muddy, sleet-whipped island off the coast of Antarctica. Just ask Leigh Ann Schultz, formerly a Director with AlixPartners, an active AlixAlumni member, and a textbook high achiever who recently completed a half-marathon at an Antarctic outpost.
Leigh Ann, a financial executive, first worked with AlixPartners as a client on a Chapter 11 case in the early 2000s, then joined the team in 2004. In 2009, she transferred from AlixPartners’ Dallas office to the D.C. office and found herself in a “freakishly athletic neighborhood” where group runs were the favored social outing, a sport that lent itself quite nicely to the consultant life, always available when she was traveling.
Positive pressure to get active escalated from “Let's go run this race and then I'll host brunch at my house,” to “let's go run this 200-mile overnight relay in bourbon country,” says Leigh Ann.
After leaving AlixPartners, Leigh Ann went to work for the Securities and Exchange Commission, then moved on to private enterprise, and currently daylights as CFO for Harvest Hosts and is chairman of the audit committee for a public telecommunications company by night. The lesson for Leigh Ann through numerous career shifts and hobbies has been that she (and her training partner-husband) increasingly seeks endurance-based challenges that go beyond hitting a PR.
“We went from, hey, let's go as fast as we can and crush it and hit a PR to, let's do these endurance events where you have to have a lot of mental toughness and you're doing it day after day after day and just finishing,” says Leigh Ann. “It was a complete mind shift.”
In the process, she has stayed engaged with old colleagues at AlixPartners, and works to make it to in-person events. It is still part of who she is, says Leigh Ann. She was at AlixPartners through a tough phase of life, “I was a young mom. I had two little kids. I had just gotten remarried, and my husband had a young daughter, so we were integrating two families.” Colleagues provided an important source of support. “I felt in my heart that I was like a family member of AlixPartners.”
Leigh Ann at the finish line
“DryBar had been on my radar for a long time,” Sarah said. “I really believed in the brand’s mission of driving empowerment and confidence for women everywhere.”
At DryBar, Sarah managed every aspect of marketing including brand, creative, digital, retail, e-commerce, partnerships, and customer analytics amongst other duties. “My role as Chief Marketing Officer allowed me to build upon all of the experiences that I had at AlixPartners and before that,” Sarah said. “DryBar was the chance to really bring all of those things together and expand our marketing to become a revenue driver for the company, including new marketing strategies such as our entertainment partnerships business.”
She is especially grateful to AlixPartners for helping her develop the critical skill sets she needs to be a leader of a rapidly growing organization. “At AlixPartners, I learned to assess situations quickly, come up with recommendations, put those recommendations to work, and be able to present them in an influential way,” Sarah said.
In 2023, Sarah moved onto her next c-suite role as Chief Marketing Officer, Chapter Aesthetic Studio at The Aspen Group.
Beyond work, Sarah enjoys her new Southern California lifestyle and when she isn’t at the beach, she is pursuing her personal passions including cooking, gardening, traveling and biking in nearby Crystal Cove State Park. She also continues an annual summer trip to the Hamptons with a group of AlixPartners employees and alumni who she considers lifelong friends.
Sarah at a DryBar and Mean Girls on Broadway event with actress Tina Fey and in Park City, Utah in 2019