She’s not the kind of person to waste a good opportunity, and her resumé is proof. Currently the chief marketing officer at Sport Clips Haircuts, she’s already led marketing teams at fast-growing companies like Raising Cane’s and Wingstop, after spending some exciting years at Frito-Lay and Pizza Hut.
So when she knew the moment was right to go back to school — a time when her kids were grown but without their own children yet, and her parents doing well — she knew she wanted to further her education with a valuable degree from a well-structured program.
And she chose the DBA program at Marshall University.
“It’s interesting,” said Clarke, a first-generation college student who grew up in Arizona and now lives in Texas. “You get your bachelor’s degree, really, for your family. … You get your master’s for your employer. This one’s for me. This one is going in, learning as much as I can and staying as sharp as I can.”
She hopes to lead a company herself someday, and this program is helping prepare her for that, as well as preparing her for yet another chapter farther down the road.
“I know eventually, when corporate is done with me, I can’t sit still and the thought of retiring and being stagnant is terrible,” she said. “So the opportunity of being able to teach later is important.”
She’s now in a cohort of 12 students from around the country earning her Doctor of Business Administration from Marshall, with plans to graduate in 2026. It’s a hybrid program with online and in-person learning experiences that she says suit her perfectly.
She tracked down students in the cohort before hers to get their thoughts about Marshall’s approach.
“What really, really attracted me was the openness of the program in the sense that, very much like a business environment, you might have the way which you plan to approach it, but you’re willing make adjustments as you go along without breaking the integrity of the program,” she said.
She expressed appreciation for faculty members like Dr. Susan Lanham and others, and for director Dr. Ralph McKinney, as well as her cohort, which includes classmates from states including Ohio, Kentucky, Utah and Virginia, as well as herself, a Texan, and others.
“My cohort is incredibly great. We have four women in the cohort out of 12 – those are my sisters in crime,” she said.
For her, it’s just another important step in a career that started as a shift manager at Taco Bell, where her boss pointed out that if she went into the salary manager program, Pepsi would pay for 90% of the cost of earning her undergraduate degree at Arizona State. That’s what she did, and eventually earned her master’s at the University of Phoenix.
Meanwhile, she was learning the craft of marketing. She really dove in at Pizza Hut, then transitioning to the ad agency Euro RSCG and then Frito-Lay, where she worked for 12 years.
“I did a variety of different roles, from traditional brand, like Cheetos, to working with customers like Walmart,” Clarke said. “My last role was marketing strategy portfolio and partnerships. So anything that you saw for the Super Bowl, that was my team. If you saw NFL ads, that was my team. That was a fabulous, incredible role. I think we had 90 partners, including leagues, teams, athletes and music artists.”
She knew that if she was going to leave, it was to get back into the fast-paced world of food service, so when Wingstop called and asked her to fill their vice president of marketing role, she did, and was quickly promoted to CMO.
She later took some time off to care for her husband, who had been diagnosed with cancer, but when he was back on his feet, she joined Raising Cane’s. Just this year, she joined Sport Clips, a haircut franchise with a sports-themed environment, where she oversees marketing, communications, partnerships and philanthropic efforts, supporting 1,850 locations.
“I love brands that are very clear on who they are,” she said. “Sport Clips is obviously one of those, very much focused on men and boys. They are founder-started, second-generation, transitioning. The son has taken it over five years ago, so that’s always a fabulous time to craft the next chapter of a story. I think they have so much untapped potential, and candidly, I just really like the people, which makes a really big difference.”
In marketing, you’re always in the people business, she said.
“It is constantly evolving and changing, and I like that,” she said. “It also allows me to be very curious at the same time. There’s a little bit of gratification in the sense that you make somebody’s life a little bit easier or better, or they feel good about themselves at the end of the day.”
If she has advice, it’s to stay curious and remember you don’t have all the answers all the time.
“Being willing to say, ‘I don’t understand that,’ is very powerful,” she said. “It seems like it wouldn’t be, because you’re admitting that you don’t know, but at the end, it really is because you’re allowing yourself the ability to understand and be able to grow at the same time.”
She’s enjoyed the process of growing through the DBA program at Marshall. As someone who worked her way through her undergraduate and graduate programs, she remembers being so busy with work that she didn’t form a lot of college connections. Being at Marshall has been different.
“Ben Eng has been great about pulling us together (to feel like we’re part of Marshall),” she said. “I feel like if I could start a DBA sorority, I would. It’s actually kind of fun because I have more Marshall gear than I do anything else.”
