The Boss

Lynn DeVault likes to golf, and read — she doesn’t watch movies or TV — and at 66, doesn’t really imagine retiring. She’s the president of Jones Management Services, which oversees and operates the many businesses owned by Cleveland millionaire and Check Into Cash founder Allan Jones.

DeVault is one of the highest-ranking women in leadership in the Chattanooga area. She’s fierce and confident, a corporate climber in an era when few women rose to top corporate jobs. She was one of the highest-ranking women at SunTrust Bank in Atlanta before leaving in the mid-1990s to work for Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, managing an investment firm owned by the heiress in northwest Arkansas.

A native of Bristol, Tennessee, DeVault returned to Tennessee at the end of the 1990s to work for Jones in Cleveland. In the years since, she has successfully spearheaded construction of the new Cleveland airport, and has made a habit of fighting government regulators in Washington, D.C., over the payday lending industry.

DeVault is a workhorse, a grinder, a good listener and a leader, according to her peers. Though DeVault says the most important name on her business card isn’t her own, she has built a reputation and legacy of her own since coming to Cleveland.

Tenacious as ever, she now has the benefit of experience, and is intentional about some things — among them, being kinder, more patient. She likes airplanes, and loves her dogs.

There is a little sign hanging in her office at the Jones Management headquarters, built in an old strip mall owned by Jones in Cleveland: “Success is a journey, not a destination,” it says.

DeVault also likes some of the musings of Bertrand Russell. And Harry S. Truman.

Also, Dwight Morrow, a turn-of-the-century American businessman, senator and diplomat who talked about the Lynn DeVaults of the world when he said, “The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit.”

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A horizontal painting of a row of horse rumps hangs over DeVault’s left shoulder when she sits at her desk and looks at you. A similar painting of horse heads accompanies it, hanging above.

“I didn’t pick it out,” she says.

She inherited it. Whoever occupied the office before her hung it up there, and left it behind.

“It’s called ‘The Board of Directors,’” DeVault says — talking heads and horses’ asses.

DeVault runs Jones’ expansive corporate portfolio, which includes businesses ranging from the national Check Into Cash chain, to Jones’ charter jet business and his upscale restaurant, The Bald-Headed Bistro. The operation of Jones’ companies is DeVault’s responsibility, and one she takes seriously. She is the caretaker of what Jones has built, and sees her task as preserving it for the next generation, keeping Jones’ children on the right track.

DeVault has no children of her own (“beyond two furry dogs,” she says) and has never been married, “to more than a job.” She is the oldest of five siblings, a group with ages ranging from the 40s to her own age, “66 years young (would you have guessed it?)”

DeVault’s 88-year-old mother still lives in the Tri-cities area in northeast Tennessee, and as the oldest of the siblings, DeVault feels the responsibility to be close to her mother, and to be a surrogate parent to the other kids.

And since coming to Cleveland, DeVault has taken on a similar role with Jones Management. If Jones himself is the risk-taking, big-dreaming entrepreneur who built the company, DeVault is the calculated, methodical steady hand that keeps it running.

And she doesn’t mind, not here or back when she worked for Alice Walton.

“I’m not an entrepreneur. They’re entrepreneurs,” DeVault says. “I’m very much a corporate thinker, planner.”

She isn’t necessarily motivated by money, or power, or certainly not recognition and influence. She likes the process. And succeeding.

“I like things that have a beginning and that have and end, because I’m sort of a planner,” she says.

Folks who worked with DeVault on the construction of the new Cleveland airport praise her leadership. DeVault was named chairwoman of the Cleveland airport authority in the early 2000s and given a mandate to build a new facility.

“It was a huge project, and she was the chairman from the time [the airport authority] was established until her term ran out a couple of years ago,” says Lou Patten, current chairman of the authority. “She was a great chairman, provided tremendous leadership, was very focused on getting the project completed and quite frankly, I don’t think we could have built the new airport without her leadership and influence.”

Patten says he never had a second thought about who should lead the panel.

“It never crossed my mind to have anybody else as a chairman,” he says. “I think I’m the one who nominated her for that position when we were first established.”

Verrill Norwood, another member of the authority and current vice-chairman, says DeVault is “smart as a whip.”

“She knows her stuff,” he says. “She thinks before she talks. She’s very financially strong.”

Norwood says DeVault steered the project through “rough waters” and was key in orchestrating diplomacy within the group and in its dealings with outside entities, like the Federal Aviation Administration.

“She’s very decisive, but don’t take that as being a dictator. She’s far from that,” he says.

DeVault had some experience with local airport management from the time she spent in Bentonville, Ark.

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DeVault is a successful woman who made it in a man’s world because she was smarter and harder-working than other people. She never expected, and still doesn’t expect, a handout or a free seat at the table.

“I, at least at the time, felt like I had to work harder,” she says, looking back at her climb. But, she says, “I never minded doing that.”

“I guarantee you I’m willing to outwork most people,” she says.

DeVault laments the fact that many of her friends are retiring now. She doesn’t want to stop working.

“I really don’t know what I would do if I didn’t work,” she says.

DeVault still believes in working harder than everyone else, in helping the folks under her responsibility figure out their problems the first part of the day, and taking the second part of the day to work on her own things. Her work-life balance is stacked heavily in favor of the former.

“You’ve got to work harder than you have time at home,” she says.

DeVault doesn’t outline a path to a position like hers.

“You can’t always say ‘I want to be the president of a large company,’” she says. “You have to do everyday what you have to do, and do it to the best of your ability.”

She doesn’t believe in inclusion quotas and mandates, but she is proud of the increased inclusion of women in executive and leadership positions and discussions — because after all, it just makes business sense.

“I don’t like quotas, but I like the fact that there’s a focus on being more inclusive,” she says. “The more opinions you consider, the better result you’re going to get.”

She believes as younger generations of business leaders come up, the inclusion of women is going to become increasingly seamless, and not forced. She understands that she is the product of a different time in corporate America, and that “the times, they are a’changing, as they say.”

Maybe, if she retired, she would have more time to golf, or read. Maybe more Pat Conroy novels. Conroy, who was born in Atlanta, wrote in his novel Beach Music “the pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life,” which would be right at home on a little sign in DeVault’s office.

Right near the “Board of Directors” paintings maybe.

Or the model jet airliner.