How a rapidly-growing Valvoline keeps pace with recruiting and onboarding at speed

Valvoline is a well-established company, but it has been changing a lot recently. Exactly how?

Valvoline is really a 160-year-old brand, but we have gone through significant amount of change the last decade. So in 2016 we split from Ashland Oil to become our own publicly traded company through an IPO offering in late 2016. Fast forward to just a couple of years ago, and in 2023 we sold the global products segment of our business, which represented a little over half of our annual revenue, to Aramco. And so now we emerge from that sale. It gave us a cleaner story with investors, because we are now a pure play, high growth retailer.

I've been with the company for about nine years. I've been in this role for about five and a half years, as Chief People Officer. In that nine years we've doubled in size based on the numbers of stores that we had. I think when we started, we were, when I started in 2016, it was around 900 stores. We're around 2,100 stores now, and we have plans between now and the end of the decade to nearly double again, growing to around 3,500 stores. We've really built our success on this quick, easy, trusted customer service model - stay in your car and we'll service your vehicles, which is our core service. An oil change in about 15 minutes or less.

Our culture is key to that. Our customer experience is only as good as the employees delivering that service. We're really proud of that and make sure that we've got a great place for them to work and grow their career.

Can you describe the services a typical Valvoline store offers?

It really is focused on preventative maintenance, so not really repairs. In addition to our core service of an oil change, we replace wipers, bulbs, air filters, cabin air filters, and do fluid servicing, treatments, top offs, tire rotations. We really focus on that. If you take care of your vehicle, just like if we take care of our bodies, they'll take care of us for many, many years.