In an industry most people associate with commodity pricing and routine maintenance, Valvoline has built something harder to replicate than any service offering: a culture so cohesive it has its own name.
They call it "Vamily."
Jon Caldwell, Chief People Officer at Valvoline, has been inside that culture for nearly a decade. He joined in 2016, the same year Valvoline spun out from Ashland as its own publicly traded company. Since then, he's steered the people function through a pandemic, a landmark divestiture to Aramco, a full C-suite rebuild, and a growth plan targeting 3,500 store locations.
Through all of it, his thesis has stayed the same: culture and talent development aren't soft assets. They're a competitive advantage, and part of a people strategy that makes aggressive growth possible.
What "Vamily" actually means in practice
Three mechanisms keep it alive.
First, over 95% of Valvoline managers started in hourly technician roles. That grow-from-within model creates generational consistency. Managers understand their teams because they were recently in those same shoes. "It perpetuates consistency in culture throughout generations of managers," Caldwell explains.
Second, Valvoline has built uniform talent processes across all 2,300 stores. Consistent employee experience is the prerequisite for consistent customer experience.
Third: traditions. The annual "Family Reunion" brings all store managers together to celebrate wins and set direction. The "Oilympics" is an internal competition held right before summer drive season, where store teams race to execute Valvoline's service process flawlessly.
"It's a huge recognition opportunity," Caldwell says. "But it also allows us to retrain our teams each and every year."
The succession challenge inside hypergrowth
Scaling from 2,300 to 3,500 locations isn't just a real estate challenge. It's a talent pipeline challenge.
Valvoline's store operations run on a clear talent ladder. Hourly technicians become assistant managers. Assistant managers become store managers. Store managers feed a pool of roughly 1,200 candidates for about 140 area manager roles.
For most of that ladder, Caldwell feels good about the pipeline. But one transition is being pressure-tested by the pace of growth: assistant manager to store manager.
Historically, that development took 18 to 24 months. The goal now is to cut it to 9 to 12.
More formal training is part of the answer. But Caldwell's real focus is on the 70% of development that is experiential: the mentorship, the store visits, the coaching conversations that have historically varied in quality depending on which market you work in.
"How do we become more prescriptive in what that looks like?" he asks. "As we've identified someone we think can be an area manager in the next six months, what does that experience look like for them?"
The goal is to systematize the informal. To make the mentorship that happens in the best-performing markets available everywhere.
Leading through the massive transformation and change
In September 2021, Valvoline announced its intent to sell its global products business to Aramco. The deal closed 18 months later. For employees, that meant 18 months of significant uncertainty about which entity they'd land in, and whether their role would survive at all.
Caldwell's primary lesson from that period is simple: communicate more than feels necessary, and start earlier than feels comfortable.
"Right when you think you're communicating enough, you probably need to do even more," he reflects.
The team also made deliberate retention commitments. They guaranteed employees with equity wouldn't lose unvested shares due to the transaction. They were transparent about severance outcomes if roles were eliminated. The effect was to give employees a clear picture of two possible futures, both of which Valvoline committed to supporting.
What followed was one of the cleaner carve-outs in recent retail history. The global products business became Valvoline Global Operations, now growing under Aramco's investment. The retail business emerged as a pure-play company with a rebuilt executive team and a cleaner growth story for investors.
His advice for any HR leader navigating similar transformation: "Don't change who you are. Be authentic and consistent in how you communicate and how you make decisions. The more consistent you are, the more it empowers the next level of leadership to make decisions confidently."
What the modern CPO role actually requires
Caldwell describes his own career evolution as a shift along a spectrum. From relational HR work toward deeper analytical capability.
For HR leaders with CPO aspirations, he sees analytical fluency as non-negotiable. "We're sitting on such great data that can give you amazing insights around how to improve your hiring practice and engage your talent."
The biggest unlocks come from connecting dots across datasets. That requires leaders who are comfortable with numbers, not just people.
His ideal HR leader profile comes down to one word: versatility. Not a deep specialist in one function, but someone who can operate across talent acquisition, compensation, learning, and analytics while bringing the EQ to navigate complex organizations.
The 70-20-10 development model applies as much to HR leaders as to the store managers Caldwell develops. Formal learning builds the foundation. But the 70%, the experience and pattern recognition that comes from being inside the business, is what ultimately separates good from exceptional.
"It's important to pause and take time for yourself," he says. "HR professionals spend a lot of energy developing others. Make sure you're continuing to sharpen your own skills too."
The proof is in the pipeline
Valvoline's 3,500-store ambition is only achievable if the people strategy scales with it. That means people who fill critical roles—like frontline store managers—need to be ready, faster. Area managers leading larger portfolios. A corporate team built for versatility, not narrow specialization.
Caldwell's decade at Valvoline is a case study in what it takes to build that kind of organization. Consistent culture operationalized through rituals and recognition. A talent pipeline that promotes from within and develops people intentionally. A CPO who leads through change by staying anchored to values when everything else shifts.
"When you stick to your core values and have a clear path around them," Omer Glass observed at the close of their conversation, "that's what everything comes down to."
Resources
- Connect with Jon Caldwell on LinkedIn
- Learn more about Valvoline
- Explore Growthspace for precision skill development at scale
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