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Music. Hello and welcome to the storied human today, I have a really cool guest, Jan Allen Ackley, he's the author of searching for change, a memoir of growing up in Appalachia. His book is a testament to his resilience and ability to overcome obstacles, find happiness and inspire others. Jan's natural humor weaves through discussions of success, hardship and overcoming life's obstacles. Jan is a multi talented individual with an impressive track record spanning 34 years as a commercial finance and economic executive with over three decades of corporate finance experience, Ackley has established himself as a go to person for companies across the United States, seeking to solve complex banking and finance problems. He rose to leadership and positions within the banking industry developing relationships with companies across the United States.
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Welcome, Jan. It's so great to have you. That's great to be here. Thank you for excited to hear your story. I just have to say your A to Z is pretty spectacular. Oh, thanks. Yeah. Your beginnings are, you know, we're kind of humble, right? And you grew up in a in an impoverished rural I mean, I'm I'm assuming it was impoverished or close to a rural area, probably, in some ways, a beautiful way to grow up, because I love being in nature, and I, believe it or not, I live in New Jersey, but I'm in a very beautiful rural area right near the Delaware River. Why don't you tell me, though, how that shaped you, what that was like?
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Yeah, it's, I like to talk about it. You know, I grew up in Eastern, southeastern Ohio, you know, fairly close to the West Virginia border. And it's in, you know, kind of, I call it the the North Central Appalachia area. And grew up in a in a single parent. I have two siblings, both older than me. My mother was divorced when I was very young, when I was a baby, and so. So growing up pretty financially poor, but also not just financially, you know, it's lack of fathers in the home. You know, my both grandfathers were were killed in the coal mines or died in the coal mines in the 30s and 20s. Even my mother grew up in an orphanage. And so it was a lack of, you know, just the lack of security of having two parents in the home and not knowing what to do. You know, as I grew, you know, when I was young, and then when I grew into being a teenager, you know, it's, it's hard for for a kid in that atmosphere to find their way forward. I can't imagine, because most of us, we have some kind of safety net or family support. You know, you mentioned even your grandparents, your grandfathers were gone, we take it for granted. You know that we can have we have a fallback, people who will catch us, and people who guide us. Without those support systems, it's hard to find your way. Oh, how did you What did you do? Like, was there a mentor who helped you, or someone in your family who, like influenced you? Yeah, you know, I it's a it's a great question, because a mentor is what I really needed. And when I was, I want to say when I was about 16 years old, I started going to a local church and a local church there in in the little town called Zanesville, Ohio, had some, had some men in it that were just really good men. And they saw this poor 16 year old kid with no dad, and they kind of took me under their wing. And I had never really been around men before. Then the men that I, that I was around, you know, weren't that good of men, but these were good men.
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And it and it showed me that there were men in the world that were that were good, and they had families, and they were successful in business and so on. And they, they really mentored me and opened my thoughts, the things I had never thought about before, that's so good. There usually is someone, you know, that's what I find with stories like this. There's somebody like my mother, had a really tough childhood, but there was someone in her family, one particularly strong person who made the difference. And I think. So cool that there were those good men that that shared it with you, that showed you like we were able to model on them. We don't need our family.
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We just need somebody. We need somebody, somebody decent, right? And God bless my mother.
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God bless my mother. She she tried, but you know, she was limited in what she could do.
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She she grew up like, I say, in the 20s and late, late 20s and 30s and so on, with no dad and in a foster home and and so her way of thinking was limited as well by her background. So it was kind of a generational thing that that my family dealt with, I think that's such a good point. It's so hard to break out of that sometimes, because you have so few resources, it's about just surviving that.
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That's absolutely true. And when you're in that mode, Lynne, it's, it's, that's all you think about your world is very small, because that's all you think about, and you don't think about the things of life that are, that are like possibilities.
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What can I do? Yeah, what are my what are my abilities that that you don't really discover unless somebody helps you discover them. That's such a good point.
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You don't dream big, right? No, you don't know exactly, right?
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Yep. So I'm just so struck by those men. Thank goodness for men like that. Yes. So what did you end up doing? Like, did you go to college after that? Did they encourage? Yeah? So, yeah.
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So, you know, really, it was, you know, high school was really hard for me, just, you know, just not having a, you know, you know, a lot of I had close friends, but it wasn't this broad friendships that you would typically have. And it was just, it was just a an odd time in life, and these men showed up at the at a really good time. I knew I needed to do something different than what my this is where my limited abilities, but that I had those but I was smart enough to know what I lacked, and I saw from these men a lot of things that I knew I lacked discipline and a lot of different things like that. So I in my senior year of high school, I enlisted in the Air Force, and then Ohio National Guard, because I knew it was something that that could be taught to me, and I needed that in my life at that time, and it turned out to be one of the best things I could could do, because the military taught me a lot of things that I didn't, did not know, and I needed to experience, and that was the start of of an important time for me. That's so good. We were just talking about that the military offers so many benefits, and sometimes the only path out for for students, it's a great way to start your journey. It is, and it wasn't Go ahead. Sorry, no, the discipline thing too, I didn't even think about that. But you I mean, how would you know that?
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Right? How would you know that kind of discipline? And they, they really instill those values that it's hard to get those for anybody, I think somebody like me, that the only thing I knew is that I needed to change the director or the direction of where I was headed.
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You know, my my past, the generations before me, were very limited, and it was like, it's kind of like being on this old dirt road, and it's a comfortable road, but that's all the road that I knew and but I knew I had to get off of this exit ramp onto the major highway of life. And I don't know how else to explain it, but something dramatic needed to happen for me to get off of that road, which I knew led to a certain place. And it wasn't that exciting. It was what my generations before me, knew very limiting. So the military was that off ramp for me, the beginning of the off ramp for me, which led into a lot of other things beyond that, but that was the ramp that I took to build into me some things that I knew I needed at the time as an 18 year old, that's so great.
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And now look at you. I mean, I'm pretty impressed with your your corporate career and your author the book sounds wonderful. When did you write the book? Well, I wrote the book just about this whole topic, because I I wrote the book about 12. 12 years ago, and it really wasn't a I didn't start out writing to make it a book. I started out my I have eight grand, I have five children, and I have eight grandchildren. Oh, how wonderful. 12 years ago, the oldest granddaughter, the grandchild, was born, and I was in the hospital, and I was sitting out in the, you know, kind of the waiting area and, and I remember sitting there alone, thinking, I, you know, what do grandfathers do? I had learned how to be a dad over the years by trial, right? And, but I didn't know what a grandfather never thought about being a grandfather. But here I was, there. I was in this in this room, and I thought, you know, the only thing that I could come up with at that time was, I just want my granddaughter to know of these lessons that I learned over since I was a little kid and and I'll put those down on paper. And so I started taking notes. I found a pad and pen in the hospital. I just started taking notes and reminiscing about things. And one of the cool things I did when I was starting at about 18, I started keeping a journal. At the time, I you know my my wife, and I knew each other since the seventh grade in junior high, but we started dating when I was 18 and and so she gave me this journal. She said, Jan, you ought to write some things that are important to you as you go day to day. So I started to do that, and I kept the journal for a lot of years. So I reflected on those right. I looked at those and more, more memories came out from that. And I just kept writing these notes for my granddaughter. And then I thought, well, you know, my kids don't know these stories either the all my adult children. And so I started to tell some people about what I was doing at work, and they said, Jan, you have a really unique, interesting background. You really ought to let other people read about this. You should think about writing a book. So that's so it took me 11 years to write a book because of my limited time.
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Yeah, I, I am a business writer, not a or I was a business writer, not a writer that of in a way that people would be interested. So I had to get coaching. So I I found some coaches in English that helped me to write. Gave me some good advice on this book. And, you know, I had it fully written.
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They ripped it apart, took many chapters out, kind of reformulated it, but it was a, you know, quite the journey to get from point A to point B on.
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In writing this book took 11 years, and I published it a year ago, year and a half ago, that's fantastic. It's on Amazon. It's getting decent reviews and so on, but I think it is a story that many people need to hear.
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It's a great story, and it's so smart of you to get coaches.
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Because I have a friend who's writing a book right now, and I've talked to other people that say sometimes, even if you are a writer, you don't have that objectivity about your about your stuff, or you don't even know how it looks should go together. Yeah, yeah. So that's so smart of you to do that, because people need your story and it, it's it's better because of that coaching. And I think it's so interesting how many different kinds of coaches we can have now, somebody I just spoke my last interview, was that I just published, was a money life coach, Whitney Ellis, she coached. She wanted to be a life coach, but she had her own really intense experiences with money and and not being good with money, and so she, yeah, she grew something out of that.
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So I just think it's great when people support each other like that. So yeah, sure, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say to your point, Lynne, it's, you know, one of the traits that I do have that's been very helpful is is a little bit of humility.
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I always look for the things that I can improve upon or don't have to help me get where I want to go. And these men, when I was a teenager, I knew what I lacked, or I had a good idea what I lacked. Then I went into the military, but with this book, I knew I needed a lot of of coaching and English people that were able to write well in that vein of telling a story, it's different. Do they literally have classes on memoir writing?
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I mean, I'm a writer, a poet, creative writer, a technical writer. I would not attempt a memoir without help. It's a it's a specific kind of writing, and there's, you know, there's rules and formatting, and there's, like, a way to spin your story.
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It's so cool. A lot of people think they're fine, though, without a coach. So I commend you for for saying, you know, I need some help. But I keep thinking of this quotation when you say that you saw what those men in church could offer you, you saw that you had lack. And it just reminds me of this quotation, if you do what everyone else is doing, you'll have what everyone else has. And that's sort of what you did. I'm so impressed with that because you did it young. You looked around and said, My family has been, you know, doing this hamster wheel kind of thing for years, right? And it gets it gets them here. So if I don't want to go here, I have to do something different. And that's, um, you know, pretty brilliant at 18 to even, like, grasp that.
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So that's I didn't have much, I didn't have much brilliance in me, Lynne, but I did have certain things that I look back now on, and I am so glad that I did it that way. Yeah, because sometimes in life, little, little things make all the difference. And those, those couple, two, three men that I got to know. I mean, they, they had no reason right to associate with me. They were one of them was a very successful businessman in town, and he called me up, and I didn't know who he was and and anyway, he came over a couple times a month, for a lot of months, and just to talk to me. And I always thought that was interesting, that I had nothing to offer him.
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I'm this 1617, year old kid in a single parent household poor, and he was the exact opposite.
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But I'm glad that he took interest in me and wanted to at least help me in any way he could. And he gave me a lot of great advice. So good. He saw something in you, and he wanted to help develop those things.
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Yeah. So tell me about how you got into corporate finance. Was that like, did you major in finance or economics? Okay, I did. I majored in finance and economics at Ohio State, and the interesting story about that goes back to when I was about five years old, my mother had been a bank teller in we didn't have, you know, there wasn't a lot of things to do at home, but she would play with us, and one of the games that she used to play with us. We called it bank.
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Let's play bank. And so she made up this, you know, cut out money and drew with crayons the denominations of it and everything. She taught me how to count change back. She was very precise, you know, you know, today's world, you just get a handful of money back from the from the person at the, you know, restaurant or the fast food place back in the day, you had to count that change. I remember, yeah, she was very precise about that. And we did that all the time, and it was her way. And looking back now, is her way to keep my brain thinking about things. And we never had money. And so as I got older, I thought, you know, I really need to learn. It's one of these things that I knew, what I lacked. I really need to understand money, because I don't have any. My mother never had any, and I don't want my fam, my future family, to worry about, you know, the stuff that I worried about. And so when I when I I finished, or I got I was in the military, and I got some of those educational benefits. The first day I walked into Ohio, I went to Ohio State.
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The first thing I did, I majored in finance, and it that was another thing that I just thought it was really cool. And when I entered, when I graduated from the bank or from the from Ohio State, I started interviewing. I interviewed with all the different banks and got into their one in particular was in Detroit. Comerica Bank moved to Detroit, yeah, and I had two little kids and my wife at the time, when I graduated and we moved to Detroit, and I started in their commercial banking program, went to school with them. They had a little several months of training, and their corporate banking training program. So that's how I got into it.
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That's so great again. Thank you, Air Force, because you had those educational benefit, you know, they kind of, yeah, they did good by you so and you just kept going, and now you're pretty impressive. Your career has been pretty impressive.
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Yeah, and you know, it's I was on the just before our call I was on, I was doing some some calls with a couple of companies, but I've been doing this for 35 years now, and experience. This is a, you know, it's not like, I'm this genius, right? It's just like, grinded through 35 years of seeing all sorts of things. And when you see things for 35 years, you you know, people come to you and say, What do I do here? Well, I saw that 20 years ago. And let's figure this out. It's great.
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That's why you want to go to a doctor who's done a lot of operations, yeah, that's exactly right. That's so cool. I noticed that too. It's just, I've been working, you know, almost 35 years, and I just most of the things people present me with at work, I have a story.
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I've done it, you know, I don't always tell them the story. I have to stop myself. But, you know, it does help to have those examples, all those examples in your in your work life, and it gets easier. I mean, you just really have a lot to pull upon.
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And I love that you do you, what do you do? As far as leadership, one of your questions, the suggested question, was about what makes a good leader. I have a feeling you you're a mentor. I just have a feeling that you are, yeah, it's, it's something I give back, you know, because of what happened to me, I know the value of being a mentor. I know the value of of and the ability of what a leader does.
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And it, and it's, it's not being the person that orders others around it's being a facilitator of learning and growth. And so those that work for me even now, you know, I don't, I tell them, hey, look, we're not in the banking business. We are in the we solve problems for people, we create opportunities for people, and we learn along the way, and my job is to help that go forward and that you're in a world where you're learning and growing and you're helping other people to solve financial problems, but that's what a leader does. They're in the trenches with the folks, but they're there to help make sure that they keep moving forward and are getting everything out of their abilities that they can. I love that. My best, my favorite, managers, have always been supportive managers, and you know, they get it like they they solve your problems and they're with you instead of that's right from above, that's right, that doesn't work.
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Well, I guess if you know, if you have enough fear, and you're you're afraid, but who needs somebody who's afraid, right?
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You just, it's much more fun to all be in it together.
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We're in it together, and we all grow together.
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I just love that, and I can't help but think that you are, you know, you're doing what they taught you way back when those men, you're one of those. Now, exactly right. Yes, it's exactly right. Circle movement.
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It is. It is full circle. And I, and I do love it. I I'm, I've trained a lot of bankers over the corporate bankers over the years and and it's, it's really interesting and fulfilling to see a younger person that is trying to make their way and have somebody they can go to as a mentor. And, you know, it's, very important to have a mentor.
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That's why young kids, I talk a lot about this in my book, the importance of fathers in the home, and, and, and because I know what it's like to not have that, and it's important to have those fathers that are advocates. I use the word advocate a lot, an advocate for a little for a child from their father is so important it lets them be okay to expand their horizon and their thinking and try things that are maybe hard, but with a little push from the dad and the mom, they achieve things that they didn't think was possible. Yeah, that's a great thought. It's so true, and it makes such a difference. You can see, when people don't have that, how they struggle. Yeah, you know, very true. We know some friends of our our kids, you know, they just had a tougher time. It's funny, too.
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When your kids grow up and they turn around and say to you, wow, we didn't realize you guys were pretty good parents. We weren't anything special, but we were involved. You know what I mean?
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Like we were on their side and supportive, and we put in a lot of time. And I always say you can't take credit if you have good kids, because then you got to take credit if you don't have good so they're going to grow the way they grow, but we tried really hard to support them, and they they came to that awareness. It was such a sweet moment when they both said it.
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They both went to college, and they said, we've heard some stories, you know, yeah, some parents just aren't, aren't.
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Maybe ready to be parents. It's like, well, that's right, you know, the same thing that you're saying. Saying, you wish those parents had had support. You know, I always say when I meet someone, I can see they, they were raised by loving people. I can tell, you know, by how they treat people, by how they are.
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And you know, it's certainly true of you, like you could just see your the influences coming through. And what a what a beautiful testament, you know, the way you came around now and became one of those mentors. I think this is an A plus story, yeah, and I appreciate that.
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Yeah, my wife has been as influential because we've been together. We started we've known each other since the seventh grade. We started dating right at the end of our senior year in high school, I love that she's she's been with me and the MO I, I confidently say she's been the most influential person in my life because of her family. We came up, we grew up on different sides of the tracks, if you will, and and so I'm shocked that she married me, but she has been very influential, and not only to me, but to our kids and and the grandkids that we now have. And so it's it's not just men. Men were very influential to me because it didn't have any in my life, but Right, my wife then became influential in showing me things about the world that I didn't know. And so it's very important for the spousal relationship to be tied like a knot. And I think it's just so good if you're a team, because that, yeah, that works so well for the kids, and obviously work well for you guys. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us? Is there anything we didn't cover that you'd like to add? Well, I the only thing I would add is, you know, as people live their lives, I think the you know, people try and be as comfortable as they can in their life, but that's the opposite of what needs to happen. I I had to do things, the more I did hard things, and it stretched me to the point where I was very uncomfortable. I learned to do that. It was the best thing for me. So people just need to not put themselves in everyday comfort, put yourself in in a place that makes you uncomfortable by stretching yourself to do good things, try things you've never tried before, and gates, doors open up when you do that.
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That's such good advice, and I've heard that elsewhere. I really, really impressed with that piece of advice, it just seems like you can't grow unless you're, you know, on the edge of being uncomfortable, that's what leads, leads to growth.
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And I think I want to order your book. We can get it on Amazon.
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Get it on Amazon there it's on you can get it on it's on audio.
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You can get a hard copy. Or you can get it on an audio version of it. It's really good on an audio so either one, fantastic.
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And also, how can people get in touch with you? I mean, I'll put all this in the show notes, but some people like journal. I just want to make sure they hear how to get in touch with you. Yeah, and this is, this is an important question. Also, I'm always willing to help people, and so it's very simple, Jan, J, a n, dot Ackley, A, C, K, L, E, y@gmail.com, that's my personal email. If you get anybody that wants to email me with a question comment, need some advice, anything like that. Email away.
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That's great.
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All right. Well, thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you, and I know people will be inspired by your story, and you just never know who's listening.
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I appreciate it. That's why I do these is because life could be hard and, and it is hard for a lot of people and and everyday people, you go through periods, and I just want to do a little bit if, if, if I can to help somebody. I think that's great.
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You know, one of the reasons I started this podcast is I, I was like, you go through something and you learn something, what's the point if you don't share it?
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You know, like, that's the beauty of it, you share it exactly, right? That that's really the best. You know that's the next step, right? Because it's not as fulfilling. It's not as fun if you can't share what you learned. And yeah, and I firmly believe you can learn from other people's mistakes.
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You don't have to make every single mistake yourself, and it's so true, I've made so many mistakes. And I try and tell my kids, before you do that, ask me first, because if there's some error to be made, I made to tell you, yeah, because I've been there, I've done them all right.
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Well, you have a great day.
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Thanks again for sharing your story. My pleasure. Sure, thanks. Lynne, see ya
