Sonja Yates Hubbard

This time of year, most children only get free rein over a pile of sweets after trick-or-treating. Not Sonja Yates. Her after-school routine was the stuff of playground legend.

As soon as the elementary school let out in Ashdown, Sonja and her younger sister, Stacy, walked a quick two blocks to the 7-Eleven their father owned.

“I’d read comics and we’d drink Icees and get a snack,” Sonja Yates Hubbard says. “We thought it was the coolest thing on Earth.”

More than 40 years later, the cool factor still hasn’t worn off for the E-Z Mart chief executive. Hubbard’s father, Jim Yates, founded his own convenience store company in 1970 and the Texarkana-based E-Z Mart business has remained a family priority since.

Though she says her father never put pressure on her to join the family business, Hubbard began working there at 16.

“One Sunday night I went to kiss him goodnight and he said, ‘We’ll leave at 7,’” Hubbard says. “School was out, so I was going to work.”

Hubbard started at the main offices, making copies, answering phones and running mail. The convenience store business was so ingrained in Hubbard’s life that it’s hard for her to remember a trip in the car where she wasn’t craning her neck to look at gas prices.

“Daddy would drive past and go ‘Where were they at?’” Hubbard says. “I spent most of my childhood turned around going ‘Uh … uh … they were at 0.98!”

After opening the first E-Z Mart in Nashville, Ark., the business quickly expanded to locations in De Queen, Mena and Dangerfield, Texas. The company maintained a rural focus, where there was little self-serve convenience store competition.

“He described the first decade as being so easy it was too easy,” Hubbard says. “‘It was shooting fish in a barrel’ was a term he would use.”

But E-Z Mart’s path from those first stores to a multimillion-dollar corporation wasn’t without sharp turns. On a cloudy afternoon in December 1998, Jim Yates was killed when the small, twin-engine jet he was piloting crashed in Howard County. Witnesses said Yates was apparently unconscious at the time of the crash; she believes he suffered a sudden blood clot or aneurysm.

At 37, after years of working as an auditor and chief financial officer, Hubbard found herself suddenly at the head of the company her father had built.

“He died on a Wednesday, and on Monday I ran my first staff meeting,” Hubbard says. “It was hard, but I told them, ‘We’ve got a multimillion dollar company to run with 500 employees and two acquisitions pending and we really don’t have a choice.’ There wasn’t time to pity yourself. Being busy was a good thing.”

JUST KEEPS GOING,

AND GOING

From that first staff meeting, Hubbard never stopped running. Every morning, she’s up by 5:45 a.m. for a CrossFit class or a round at the gym with Stacy. Then it’s back home for a quick coffee and breakfast (usually just an egg or cottage cheese) before heading to work “in a mad rush.”

In September, Hubbard’s schedule was so bloated that she spent seven nights in seven different places, bouncing from a small town in Great Britain to London and then the outskirts of London before heading back to Texarkana. The next day it was off to Washington, followed by St. Louis and Little Rock.

“I did then get to sleep in my own bed for five nights before leaving for Atlanta,” Hubbard says.

But for all the rush, Hubbard doesn’t show an ounce of it. Relaxed and eager to laugh, Hubbard has boundless energy that leaves many of her colleagues and employees calling her the Energizer Bunny. And from the newest administrative assistant at E-Z Mart headquarters to fellow corporate CEOs and her co-board members on the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank Board of Directors, Hubbard maintains the same easy demeanor.

“What you see in public is the same as she is in private,” Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives at the National Association of Convenience Stores, says. “There are no airs, no affectations. She is real. There is a reason that people gravitate toward her.”

Ask her if she’d ever consider doing something other than working with E-Z Mart, Hubbard laughs.

“What else would I do? It’s all I know.”

Early on the day of her father’s death, Hubbard was in his office, talking to him about whether to take the company public.

“We talked over the year end financials, pending acquisitions and office expansion,” Hubbard says. “He said that he didn’t think the public option was something we wanted.”

Yates knew that Hubbard, along with her husband, Bob, and sister, Stacy, were committed to running the company after he retired. They didn’t talk about it often, but Yates and Hubbard both knew she’d move into the CEO role after Yates left.

“I’d always planned on doing this, but I wanted him golfing and traveling and playing with the grandkids,” Hubbard says. “I didn’t know it would be so soon.”

THE FAMILY BUSINESS

Hubbard wasn’t the only Yates family member who had to adjust after her father passed. Her husband, Bob, and sister had both started working for E-Z Mart years earlier. Bob now serves as president and chief operating officer for the company, while Stacy serves as chief financial officer.

Both Hubbard and her sister became certified public accountants, and Hubbard says the credentials helped with a smooth transition into her role as CEO. For both daughters, Jim Yates had been “Mr. Yates” at the office. Rather than give them special treatment, Yates was careful to show employees that Hubbard was treated like any other employee.

“I took some of my tongue-lashings publicly,” Hubbard says. “Some of those were very painful, but in hindsight he helped. I couldn’t have stepped in and had the team’s respect if he hadn’t done that.”

Now, with her sister and husband working just feet away, Hubbard, 51, doesn’t have a problem keeping work and family life separate.

“People always ask us how we get along and work together all day and then go home to each other,” says Bob Hubbard, who met his future wife in elementary school. “At work, there really are days where we just have lunch together and that’s the only time we talk. Everybody’s got a job to do, and we stay very busy.”

The Hubbards own a house on the same property in Texarkana, Texas, where Hubbard’s mother, FaEllen Yates, lives. Stacy’s home is there as well.

And despite E-Z Mart growing from a handful of stores to hundreds, Hubbard has no intention of moving her family — or her company — away from the Southern town. The corporation serves as a sponsor for the local Race for the Cure and American Cancer Society events, as well as offering grant money to teachers who live in towns with an E-Z Mart, and partnering with Arkansas Children’s Hospital to sponsor a new cafe in the Little Rock hospital.

BEYOND TEXARKANA

But while Texarkana is home, Hubbard has racked up her share of frequent-flier miles, hitting a million miles several years ago.

Between serving on local hospital boards and working with the local country club, Hubbard serves on the Arkansas Research Alliance board, the Arkansas Aviation Alliance Board. And she is active with the National Association of Convenience Stores, previously serving as president.

When Julia Mobley, CEO and chairman of the board of Commercial National Bank in Texarkana, was asked by Little Rock’s Federal Reserve Board chairman for a recommendation for a new member to serve on the St. Louis Federal Reserve board, she immediately thought of Hubbard.

“Not only is she a CPA, she manages a chain of more than 300 convenience stores,” Mobley says. “She is one of the most capable, dynamic businesswomen I know. She’s a goal setter and she is accomplished at meeting those goals.”

Balancing E-Z Mart with her work on the Federal Reserve board adds many travel days to her schedule, but Hubbard says it’s worth the jet lag.

“How can I miss going to Washington, D.C., and seeing Janet Yellen, who might be the next Federal Reserve chair, or [current Fed Chairman] Ben Bernanke on his last visit to St. Louis?” Hubbard says. “What I’ve learned to do on flights is just take a Benadryl and go to sleep.”

TOUGH CALLS,

BRIGHT FUTURE

Despite the weeks of travel, Texarkana remains Hubbard’s focus. While the years after her father’s passing were a tough transition, Hubbard found her own footing quickly.

“Sonja is very inclusive. She likes to get everybody’s opinion and feedback,” Bob Hubbard says. “But she’s still the one that’s going to … decide the direction the company needs to go.”

In the late ’90s, as the company bought 140 stores just after Jim Yates’ death, the convenience industry took a turn. Mass merchants introduced their own stations into the small towns that had been E-Z Mart’s territory. The market saturation brought revenues down, sometimes below cost.

“It was a perfect storm,” Hubbard says. “We had about three or four years of financial hell, to put it bluntly.”

After looking at the numbers — and taking emotions out of the equation — Hubbard sold or closed a substantial volume of the stores, going from about 525 stores to about 300 today.

“That pains my ego sometimes, until I look at the financials,” Hubbard says. “It was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it was without pain.”

With a smaller number of stores to focus on, Hubbard is organizing major renovations to stores across the country. The renovations are designed to emphasize new food options and make grab-and go drinks easily accessible. Hubbard hopes that public misperceptions of things like the food offerings at convenience stores will change in the coming years, given more healthful options for people who don’t have many other grocery options in town.

One thing that won’t be changing: E-Z Mart’s small town focus.

“What makes us stand apart is our people,” Hubbard says. “I like nothing more than for a store to be known as ‘Oh, that’s Betty’s store or Steve’s store’ instead of E-Z Mart.’”

But while she would prefer her individual stores to feel more local than corporate, Hubbard’s influence on the brand is undeniable. It was crayons from her desk that drew the first drafts of E-Z Mart’s trademark green and-orange logo. And it’s her trademark energy and head for finance that will lead the company into 2014 and beyond.

“More than one time, I’d ask myself, ‘What would Daddy do?’” Hubbard says. “But times have changed. It doesn’t matter. Here’s what I need to do.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Sonja Hubbard

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Nov. 9, 1961, in Oklahoma City

FAMILY: Husband Bob and daughter Lauren, 26

THE GADGET I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: That’s easy, my iPhone

PEOPLE SAY I REMIND THEM OF: The Energizer Bunny

MY TRADEMARK EXPRESSION IS: ‘I’ve been thinking …’ This sparks fear in my husband, daughter and entire team.

I’D GIVE ANYTHING to have met the First Continental Congress. I’d love to hear their insight on the crafting of the Constitution, ask where we went wrong and for suggestions on how we get these idiots to do their jobs, work together and do what is best for the country, not one party.

PEOPLE WHO KNEW ME IN HIGH SCHOOL THOUGHT I WAS: Involved in everything

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED WAS: ‘Make your word your bond.’ My dad always taught us to do what we said we’d do

MY GREATEST FEAR: Jumping out of an airplane

MY FIRST JOB: Working the concession stand at the Millwood Country Club pool

A PERSONAL HERO: My parents, grandparents, family, teachers, soldiers, civil servants, volunteers, those who care for and about others, who make our lives better and who ‘do’ because it is simply the right thing

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Unique