Vicki was a bright student who started college on an academic scholarship in her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee. In her second year of school, she dropped out because her parents divorced, and her mother was responsible for Vicki, her younger brother and a sister who had Down syndrome. “This was in the late 1960s, and there weren’t a lot of options for children with disabilities,” Vicki explains. “I was working, going to college, and helping care for my sister. I couldn’t continue.”

Eventually, she married a dashing young second lieutenant stationed in the 101st Airborne Division in nearby Fort Campbell, Kentucky. When he got out of the service, the couple moved back to his hometown of Minneapolis, where he went to school on the GI bill. “I had never lived in a big city,” Vicki recalls, and even though the marriage didn’t work out, you can hear in her voice that those were good years. “We were kids,” she says with a laugh. It was the divorce that mad her look seriously at her own career. She found a job booking parties and banquets at the Minneapolis Sheraton, a smallish hotel in a great location by the airport.

“I had never been exposed to business before, and I absolutely loved it,” Vicki says. “We were doing business with all these different companies. It was so cool.” Right away she saw the advantage of the hotel industry: You meet all kinds of folks. In a lot of jobs, such as accounting or finance, “you’re sort of doing the same thing every day,” she says. “But when you’re doing hospitality, you can talk to a pharmacy company and learn about that business, then you could sit down with someone and help them plan their wedding one day.”

In other words, she loved the way her job exposed her to the world. “One of the first parties I planned was a bar mitzvah,” she recalls. “I was from Clarksville, Tennessee. I didn’t even know what a bar mitzvah was. It was great.”

Another exciting aspect of the hospitality industry is the allure of travel. Every day Vicki would walk into the hotel and see gorgeous framed travel posters of other Sheraton hotels in exotic locations such as Rio and Paris. “I love to travel. I would see all those posters and say, ‘I’m going to go there someday.’”

When Vicki left Sheraton, it was because she’d been offered a job at another Minneapolis hotel. It was a jump in pay and a bigger position—but she’d be soliciting sales, not just answering the phone to book and plan events. “I was really scared,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ I remember having a conversation with a woman who was a sort of mentor for me at the time, and I said, ‘They’ve offered me the job, but I don’t think I can do this because I don’t have a briefcase.’ I remember her looking at me and saying, ‘Buy a briefcase.’”

Vicki is self-assured and confident now, so it’s funny to think of her being so full of self-doubt at her first step up the ladder, which just goes to show how quickly we can learn—and Vicki was a quick learner.

Her new job at Ramada had a more corporate atmosphere than the Sheraton job—and being more corporate, the Ramada job had a clearly defined path for promotions. Vicki brought her briefcase to work and gained confidence in herself. She even earned a promotion to multilevel sales manager. She went from someone who saw obstacles everywhere—like not owning a briefcase—to someone who surmounted those obstacles.

These were also fun years. While working at Ramada, Vicki met her second husband, Bill, who was in the restaurant business. The two of them thought they had learned so much in their hospitality careers that between them they should be able to start their own business and get rich.

Vicki isn’t the only person in this book who went out on her own and started a company. Starting your own business is, after all, part of the American Dream. My first book was all about people who have started their own companies rather than work for a corporation. But Vicki’s story also shows why I’ve written this second book—which is about how you can get the best of both worlds: the security of a job plus the excitement and advancement of entrepreneurship. Because running your own business is just plain tough.

In a nutshell, Vicki and her husband jumped out of corporate jobs—for a few years—and opened their own restaurant. That stint taught them something important. “The thing that Bill and I found was we liked the structure of corporate life,” Vicki says. “We said, ‘Man, we’re working ourselves to death out here, and we are not making a whole lot of money. Let’s go back to something we know.’” They were honest with themselves when things weren’t working out, so they sold the restaurant and moved to suburban Chicago where she returned to Ramada.

This time, Vicki was regional director of field marketing at Ramada. She worked with all the hotels in a territory, pulled together all the franchise owners, and got them behind some of the corporate marketing efforts. She gathered the franchisees and presented them with opportunities to do co-op marketing, where the corporation would foot some of the bill but the franchisees had to kick in a share. Her territory was huge and included the Midwest and Northeast. But for someone who loves to travel and stay in nice hotels, it was a great job.

Working for the corporate side of things, Vicki learned a lot of inside information. One of the things she found out was that Ramada was about to be acquired by one of its own franchisees. This didn’t sit well with Vicki, who knew the buyer and didn’t want to work for him. “I didn’t think I would fit in the new company culture,” she says. “I wanted a change, I wanted a really stable environment,” she recalls. “So I said, ‘I want to go with the most stable hotels out there.’”

To her, that stable hotel would be Holiday Inn—and it just so happened that they had an opening in field marketing covering the Northwest.

But stability wasn’t something to be found in the hotel industry. A month after joining Holiday Inn, the company announced it was being sold to Bass, a British beer brewer. Within 2 years the company moved its headquarters from Memphis to Atlanta, and Vicki followed. When she made the move, it was for a senior title: director of product marketing. Vicki’s husband, who is older than her, was retired and moved with her to Atlanta.

Once she reached the title of director, Vicki started to see how competitive the upper ranks really are. This is the point in a career where a lot of people get frustrated—this is also where Vicki started to hone her philosophy of finding out what the company needed and identifying how she could fulfill that need.

It started when she was leading an ill-fated effort. “It was awful,” Vicki recalls. “We were going to venture into electronic entertainment.” Holiday Inn’s new owner, Bass, also owned an electronic gaming machines business in the United Kingdom and thought it would be a good idea to have gaming centers at all the Holiday Inns. “They were convinced this was a huge opportunity,” Vicki recalls. “It turned out to be a nightmare.” Unfortunately, as vice president of new product development, the gaming project had been put under Vicki’s leadership. “At some point I figured, ‘This is going nowhere, and we are pouring money down a rat hole.’”

Vicki didn’t want to go down with the ship, so she took the initiative to talk to her boss—even though they didn’t have a great relationship. “I went to my boss and said, ‘This isn’t going to work, and I just cannot, as an officer of the company, see us going forward with this.’ He said, ‘I get your point. So what are you going to do?’”

Vicki was shocked. Her boss was leaving her out on a limb—but she swallowed her anger and thought to herself, “Well, clearly I’m not getting any help from you transitioning into anything else.”

This was a situation that could be a career killer—you’re tasked with something that’s not working. Vicki’s way of dealing with it was genius.

“There was no clear place for me to go,” Vicki says. So she sat down with the company’s business plan, looked at it, and thought, “There’s got to be an opportunity for me here somewhere.” She looked at all the things that were identified as critical to the company in the next 5 years. Then she looked at what kind of resources were being dedicated to meeting those goals. That’s when she found it: Fostering communication in franchise relations was listed as a goal, but no one was really in charge of it.

So she went right to the president of the company and said, “I’d like to talk to you. I have a proposal. I realize you don’t know me very well, but I’ve been with the company for a long time, and I’ve got a lot of history. I think we’re vulnerable. I’ll be perfectly candid with you. I’m looking for something I could pick up because I will be phasing out of this other effort. I think there’s an area of need here, and I have the skill set to take this on. I would propose to you that you create this position and put me in it.” He came back 3 days later and told her he thought she was right. The company created a new position for Vicki and put her in charge of communications between corporate and its franchises.

The moral of the story: “Find your opportunity,” Vicki says. “Create your opportunity and go for it. Don’t let somebody else determine your future. You’ve got to find that need that’s not being served.” Little did she know the challenges ahead.

When times are good, they’re great. In the booming late-1990s, Vicki worked her way to the title of senior vice president of corporate affairs. There was a series of mergers and acquisitions, and the Holiday Inn brand became subsumed under the International Hotel Group (IHG) corporate name. That’s when the going got tough.

In the downturn of late 2000, when technology industries crashed, the hotel industry was hit hard. One whole sector of American business was stalling out; struggling technology companies certainly didn’t need conference rooms or hotel rooms. Then the September 11th terrorist attacks happened. “It had a devastating impact on our industry; you can’t imagine,” Vicki says. Vacancy rates fell through the floor, and revenues dropped by 50 percent across the board at all the hotel corporations. “It wasn’t just in the United States. We saw that everywhere. We had this whole lockdown mentality. Travel came to a standstill.”

Yet, just 2 days after September 11th, Vicki used the same philosophy for her company as she had used for her career: find the need. “We were going crazy trying to account for everybody,” Vicki says. “We couldn’t get a hold of people in New York. Cell phones weren’t working. It was just chaos.” In the midst of this crisis, Vicki saw there was a need for IHG to step up and help: The company should give $1 million to the Red Cross to aid in disaster relief efforts. At first her boss thought she was nuts. They didn’t have that kind of money in the budget to donate, but she persevered. “I said, ‘I have a plan,’ and I sat down and laid out a plan for how I thought we could get there.” Her plan included soliciting corporate donations from IHG’s business partners, offering customers the ability to convert their Priority Club rewards points into cash donations to charity, collecting donations from their franchisees, and in-kind donating hotel rooms for rescue workers. The company might not have an extra $1 million lying around, but it had plenty of resources to help raise the funds.

When she showed the plan to the company president, he asked, “Do you honestly think we can do this?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Do it.”

“Philanthropy is an important part of American culture,” Vicki says. She knew deep in her bones that the Holiday Inn brand, which made up the bulk of IHG’s holdings in the U.S., needed to step out and identify itself as part of the solution. “People in this country have such a strong feeling for the Holiday Inn brand. It would have been wrong if we hadn’t done something,” she says.

As other disasters hit, the model Vicki put into motion was brought out again and again. When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, IHG stepped up again to raise money to help. And not only with rescue and relief, but also to help sustain the travel industry on the island. IHG kept long-term employees on the payroll, even when there were no jobs for them. They did the same after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

Vicki and her staff also came up with IHG’s Designs of Hope, which is a gala of fundraising events held each spring in U.S. cities where IHG has hotel properties. In 5 years, the events raised $5 million for UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s fund.

Looking back, Vicki says her hotel industry career “has been fabulous.” She recommends her career strategy—finding a need at your company that you can fulfill—to up-and-coming executives. It’s led her on a successful path in an industry she loves.

“I feel like I’m successful because my definition of success is being satisfied with where you are,” Vicki says. “And I feel good about that.”

As Vicki says, if you can find a need that you can fulfill in your company, you’re there. Look at your own company or a company you’d like to work for, see where you could offer solutions, and see where it takes you.