How does one reach the executive leadership team of a multi-billion dollar public energy company, guiding it through its stand-alone transformation while bringing together its far-flung employee base and helping it manage more than $8 billion in transactions before handing it off in a $6 billion corporate merger of shale-oil heavyweights?
For Kevin Vann, Charles Page High School Class of 1989, and former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of WPX Energy, that journey began delivering the Sand Springs Leader and the Sunday Tulsa Tribune as a young boy with two paper routes in town.
He and his father, Jim, would be up before the sun to fold and bag the papers, and deliver them throughout Sand Springs, routes dotted with the houses Kevin still vividly recalls to this day.
But the newspaper delivery business was just the start of learning the values of hard work and relationship-building that would steer Kevin’s career to the corporate boardroom.
There was the Fibercast Fishing Tackle Outlet Store on Main Street, on the days when athletic practice or tutoring Native-American classmates at Central Junior High didn’t interfere.
There, Kevin, sweeping floors and checking inventory, could choose between $3 an hour or fishing lures. He usually took the fishing lures. There was a lawn-mowing business, and work at a pallet yard in between baseball and basketball practice.
Kevin’s first taste of college at Oklahoma State proved disappointing, with a GPA so low it cost him his scholarships. That was also the first time he wasn’t holding a job while attending school. Kevin thinks that pause from working was a big distraction. He needed that purpose.
So the summer following freshman year, he returned home for an overnight six-day-a-week shift at Horner-Waldorf Box Company, recouping the lost scholarship money before heading back to OSU as a sophomore with more motivation.
His grades improved, as did his life’s fortunes, as Hayley became a part of his life.
And with her calming influence, Kevin says he began, for the first time, crafting long-term goals. That led him after OSU graduation to the international accounting firm Arthur Anderson, before joining Tulsa’s Williams Companies, there rising to Vice President, Controller and Chief Accounting Officer before being part of leadership in the WPX spinoff, and its eventual sale to Devon Energy. Kevin has maintained the outlook grounded in growing up a Sandite.
Whether negotiating big investments with billionaires, or being a father to daughters Tatum and Jenna, Kevin says building relationships and finding human commonality is a key to not just business success, but life’s success and the happiness and fulfillment that brings. The foundation of which was built upon all those early mornings as a 9-year-old paperboy, hurling the Sand Springs Leader.