As a child, Carol Yancey loved sports.
The only girl among four siblings, “I probably grew up a little tough,” she says.
An avid baseball fan, Yancey excelled at playing softball and soccer, among other athletic pursuits. But when it came time to consider potential career paths, she chose to follow another of her many talents.
“My father was very astute with numbers,” she says, “so I’m pretty sure I got his gift.”
Yancey put her math skills to work as an accounting major in the Terry College, where, at a career fair, the third-year student caught the attention of John Schraudenbach, a future Ernst & Young partner quickly becoming known within the company for his recruiting acumen.
“We would meet 50 students,” recalls Schraudenbach (BBA ’81, MAcc ’82). “And she just stuck out. We probably hired 12, 15 people in audit that year, and she was certainly at the top of that class. It’s hard to define, but you can see the people who have it. And she definitely had it.”
Those intangibles would carry Yancey through a long and rewarding career in numbers. If Schraudenbach was the business-world equivalent of a pro sports scout, Carol Yancey was a first-round draft pick.
‘The rest is history’
Growing up in Atlanta, family was a central part of life for Yancey and her three brothers.
Their father, who built a career in sales, taught them the value of a strong work ethic, while their mother was “super organized,” says Yancey. “You don’t raise four kids and not be super organized. She has a lot of energy and is very active. She loves to host and entertain, and I got that from my mom, too.”
Early on, family ties made clear the power of a strong support system, says Yancey.
“I watched my mom raise kids, and she worked outside of the home (as well), and I watched my mom be successful. … And I learned from that, and then I (realized), ‘I can do this too.’”
Yancey formed many lasting relationships in her youth — chief among them with a boy named Mike, who would become her husband and father to their three kids.
“We were high school sweethearts,” she says. “We grew up together. Our families knew each other.”
When it came time for the couple to make college decisions, Mike accepted a scholarship to play baseball at Georgia Tech. Even so, Yancey says she never doubted she was meant to be a Dawg.
“I grew up in Atlanta as a Bulldog fan. Of course I was going to go to UGA,” she says. “I applied there with a lot of my high school friends and had no plan to do accounting. I probably didn’t even know what accounting was, but I was good at math.
“I took accounting classes and got As, and then I started seeing the job opportunities, and I said, ‘I’m gonna do accounting.’”
Yancey excelled in the J.M. Tull School of Accounting and, at Schraudenbach’s urging, accepted a job at EY upon graduation, working in the firm’s audit practice. Before long, she found herself encouraging other promising undergraduates to join the fold.
“Going into public accounting, they give you a strong support system,” she says. “They give you mentors. They make sure they’re shaping you towards development. And in doing that, they encourage you to go back to campus. So early on, I would come back to Terry to talk to students.”
But it wasn’t long before one of the company’s top clients took notice of the gifted young accountant, and in 1991 Yancey decided to join the team where she would spend the rest of her career.
“She very quickly went on the Genuine Parts Company audit, and she served them for several years until they obviously saw her talent,” says Schraudenbach. “They hired her away, and the rest is history.”
‘Carol was front and center’
Best known in the U.S. as the parent company of NAPA Auto Parts, Genuine Parts Company (GPC) began in 1928 with a single store in downtown Atlanta. By the time Yancey was hired, the company had become a global leader in automotive and industrial parts.
“I wasn’t intending to leave EY,” she says, “but the opportunity came up, and I could envision myself working there. I (loved) the culture, the uniqueness of the people, the mentors. There was a lot of tradition, but (also) a lot of growth opportunities.”
While Yancey’s knack for numbers continued to serve her well at GPC, she rose through the company’s ranks thanks largely to her willingness to embrace the unfamiliar. “I did just about everything,” she says, including wide-ranging roles such as corporate secretary, “and I learned a ton. I really broadened myself.
“I had a mentor who liked for you to be professionally uncomfortable,” she explains. “We can all get very comfortable in our jobs. So (if a supervisor says), ‘We’d like you to work on this project, or take on this group,’ your answer might be, ‘I don’t know much about that, that’s not my background.’ … To be professionally uncomfortable (means you) get in there and do it. When I reflect back, I was a better leader for doing those things.”
After serving in positions of increasing responsibility, in 2013 Yancey was named GPC’s executive vice president and chief financial officer.
As its first female corporate officer, Yancey helped lead the Fortune 200 company through a period of unprecedented change, including expansion within Europe and to areas such as Australia, as well as strategic divestitures from some of the firm’s long-held assets.
“I learned that status quo is not always an option,” she says. “Finance has become much more strategic. You’re partnering with the business on operations, technology, expansion — finance uses the data to predict trends.”
CEO Paul Donahue credits Yancey with helping steer GPC through “uncharted waters.”
“The business began to change, and we had to change,” he says. “We made some really difficult decisions. … But today, we are much better positioned than we were a decade ago for making all those tough decisions. And Carol was front and center on every one of those.”
Those decisions quite literally paid off: during Yancey’s tenure as CFO, the newly restructured company’s sales grew from $13 billion to more than $20 billion, leading the Atlanta Business Chronicle to name her Public Company CFO of the Year in 2020.
Schraudenbach says GPC was the fortunate beneficiary of Yancey’s elite business mind.
“Carol would have been successful wherever she went,” he says. “She’s very smart, (but) she’s also very intuitive. Her ability to quickly assess what’s going on, beyond the financial data, is a true skill. She can cut through everything and get to the main issues.
“She’s great at seeing the forest, not just the trees,” Schraudenbach adds. “But she can also see the trees.”
‘A lot more dinners at home’
In 2022, after more than three decades at the company, Yancey retired from Genuine Parts Company.
“Everybody was worried,” admits her friend and GPC board member Donna Hyland. “We were all thinking, ‘My gosh, how in the world is Genuine Parts going to function without Carol Yancey?’ She was just so core to the culture. You could feel Carol everywhere you went.”
Unsurprisingly, Yancey had planned ahead.
“She put such a strong team in place, placed all the right people there,” says Hyland, president and CEO of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “Certainly, people missed her — but there were no ramifications for the company. Everything kept right on going.”
Retirement ushered in a new phase of life for Carol and Mike, as well as their children, David, Jennifer and Heather. The schedule is different, but no less demanding.
In addition to serving on multiple corporate boards, Yancey is a director for the Boy Scouts of America’s Atlanta Area Council and a member of Terry’s Dean’s Advisory Council. She makes time for volunteer engagements — come Christmastime, it’s common to find her ringing the Salvation Army bell — and participates in Terry initiatives such as the Professional Women’s Conference.
But there’s more time to unwind, as well. “We are doing a whole lot more travel,” says Yancey. “We have a lake house, and we spend a lot of time there. We are able to spend a lot more time with our families and help out our parents.”
Still massive baseball fans, “we have Braves season tickets,” she adds. “Last year, we went to 50 games. … And (there are) a lot more dinners at home together.”
Perhaps most meaningful to Yancey is providing mentorship to students and young professionals — sharing hard-earned wisdom with the next generation to help them harness their abilities and identify their passions.
Speaking to a Tull class in February, Yancey reflected on the most important lesson she learned over the course of her career: “It’s not accounting,” she said. “It’s not numbers. It’s people.”
As the class ended, students approached to introduce themselves, ask questions and solicit advice. Yancey happily obliged, speaking to each of them at length, offering guidance and exchanging contact information.
“I learn so much from being around younger talent, being around students,” she says. “Whether you’re mentoring or being mentored, it goes both ways.”
After all, who knows? One of them may well be the next Carol Yancey.