Gen X CEO of a popular retail chain was once a single mother surviving on $882 a month and pinto beans before finding success

For some, the road to success starts with a cushy MBA and a fast-track grad scheme. For the CEO of the wedding dress giant, David’s Bridal, it was a rockier start than most. She was barely scraping by, juggling working weekends as a bartender, with taking care of her young child and college when she started out.

“My take-home pay per month when I divorced her father and was living on my own as a single mom was $882. My car note was $350, and my rent was $350,” Kelly Cook told The New York Times in a recent interview.

To make do with what little she had in the early days of her career, she “ate a lot of pinto beans and cornbread.”

Cook is currently helming a bridal dress giant with 200 stores across the U.S. and Canada, boasting around 5,000 employees. But rewinding a few decades back, her life looked a lot different; she grew up without much money, having to get a job right after high school to help support her mother. Cook was later able to pursue higher education, marrying “very, very quickly” into her years at junior college and having a child.

The 58-year-old executive’s first white-collar job at Continental Airlines would send her on a journey to executive roles at retail titans like DSW, Kmart, and Pier 1 Imports. But those early days, taking classes during the day and working at night, taught her an invaluable life lesson.

“It proved to me that life’s tough, but you don’t have to worry about life,” Cook said. “Just worry about today.”

Cook’s beginnings: riding the poverty line and juggling school, work, and a kid

The David’s Bridal executive has a very different origin story than the likes of Elon Musk and David Koch.

Cook was raised somewhere between the lower and middle-class by a stay-at-home mother and firefighter father, but her life took a turn in high school when her parents got divorced, forcing Cook to give up a scholarship at Baylor University to help with her mom’s bills. She was later able to attend a junior college—taking every math class available—while also falling in love, quickly marrying and having a child eight months later.

While Cook was still in school, she and her husband split, ushering in the responsibility of being a single mom.

“Classes were during the day, and I worked at night,” Cook recalled. “I was a Bennigan’s bartender on weekends, and during the week I worked as a registration clerk in the emergency room at the hospital my mother worked in.”

Thanks to her determination and passion for math, the Southern-born CEO went on to be a finance and logistics analyst for Continental Airlines in 1994. She worked her way up to director of customer relations management the airline business, proving her leadership chops to take on large administrative roles.

Cook went on to be the vice president of employee and customer engagement at $93 billion company Waste Management Inc., before taking on the role of chief marketing officer at huge retail chains including DSW, Kmart and Sears, and Pier 1 Imports. Coming in as David’s Bridal’s CMO in 2019, she worked her way up to the CEO gig this April.