Tim Fuller was nearly a decade into a career in banking and private wealth investment when he got a call from Michelin asking if he’d be interested in selling tires.
“I wasn’t really looking to get into the manufacturing or automotive industries, but I had a mentor once tell me, ‘Look, if a company ever calls you, listen – you don’t know what they’re going to say,’” Fuller said. “So, I listened to Michelin.”
At the time, Michelin’s North American office was actively recruiting marketers with financial expertise. Fuller had been itching for a new challenge, so he left his job as an investment manager, gave up his licenses and took a leap of faith.
It changed the trajectory of his career. Over the past nine years at Michelin, he’s worked his way up to his current role overseeing marketing efforts for aircraft tires in North America, Central America, South America and Great Britain. Along the way, he earned his MBA from Colorado State University’s College of Business, squeezing in study time after work from his home in Greenville, S.C.
“In every class, I’ve been able to pull stuff out almost immediately and start using it, start applying it and changing how I work, how I interact with some things, how I understand and interpret some things,” Fuller said.
‘I want to make more of an impact’
Fuller grew up in New Hampshire, where a series of internships with an investment firm sparked an interest in Wall Street and investing. After graduating from college, he took a job in banking with the goal of breaking into investments.
He ultimately landed a job in private wealth management – but after a few years, he realized he wanted to be doing more.
“Unless I was going to move to Atlanta, which is where the bank was headquartered out of, there really wasn’t any more progression I could make – I was kind of hitting the ceiling,” Fuller said. “Here I am, 29 years old, and I’m like, ‘I want to keep growing. I want to be challenged. I want to learn more. I feel like I could do so much more. I want to make more of an impact.’ That got me very receptive to Michelin.”
In his tenure at Michelin, Fuller has held four different positions, which he describes as “four different careers.” All three times he’s been promoted, the positions have been largely undefined, with the company trusting him to figure it out.
“Only my first job had a defined job description – the other three I’ve had have been very ambiguous, and they said, ‘Hey, we think this is what we want to do, but build out the job description and do it and do it well and report back,’” Fuller said. “That was really the big thing to get me to jump to Michelin – I could jump into finance if I want to. I could stay in marketing, I could go into sales, I can go into industry. I could go into R&D or engineering.
“We have plenty of folks that are in sales that then say, ‘Hey, I want to get into engineering,’ and Michelin says, ‘OK, we’ll pay for your degree, we’ll send you to tire design school.’”
Starting at Michelin
When Michelin hires new employees, the company typically brings them in on the bottom rung and places them into an intensive 12-week training program.
After Fuller completed the training, he and his family moved from South Carolina to Brighton, where he worked as an area sales manager, managing all the company’s passenger and light truck contracts in Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, western Nebraska and western Kansas.
A few years later, he was called back to the company’s North American headquarters in South Carolina, where he began handling marketing campaigns targeting retailers around the country.
Next, he began working on strategies for marketing the tires that come with a vehicle when it’s purchased, including how to get consumers to continue to purchase Michelin tires when it’s time to replace their tires for the first time.
Last year, he was promoted to his current role of zone marketing director for Michelin Aircraft Tire, overseeing a territory that accounts for the majority of the company’s global aircraft revenue.
“I really love the strategic challenge of international business,” he said. Up until recently, all his sales and marketing experience was within North America, but now he oversees a region that spans several continents.
“There are a lot of similarities in how they do business, but there are also a lot of differences,” he said. “I find that really fascinating, and developing strategies for North America is different from South America, which is different from England and Ireland.”
Enrolling in the Online MBA
The College’s Online MBA program allowed Fuller to balance his schoolwork with his full-time job and his life with his wife and three daughters – but it wasn’t always easy.
Sometimes, like when Fuller had to finish homework on the airplane on his way to a work event, he started to wonder why he was doing it all. But it’s been worth it, he says. He earned several promotions while pursuing his MBA, and he began applying what he was learning “almost instantly.”
For example, when he started the Online MBA program in 2017, he was in a role that involved doing postmortems of campaigns and specials to their effectiveness.
“The question that was always asked was, ‘Was this campaign worth it? Did it move the needle?’ If they’re buying, say, a million tires a month, and we do a campaign, do they then buy 1.1 million? And then is that sustained, or does it drop off?” Fuller said. “How do you answer the question, ‘Did this change buying behavior?’”
He quickly realized he could apply what he was learning in Kelly Martin’s statistics class. He went from learning how to conduct t-tests to determine the confidence levels of his data one day to using them in his work the next.
‘Keep things in perspective’
Thinking back on his career so far, Fuller’s advice to others is to not sweat the small stuff and maintain a healthy perspective.
“Let the majors be majors and minors be minors,” Fuller said. “Even within Michelin, I’m not that important – if I just stopped working today, Michelin will continue on without me. So, keep that in perspective: Your career is awesome, it’s great, but it’s not the end-all, be-all. I don’t want my career to define me. I want to define my career.”
About CSU’s College of Business
The College of Business at Colorado State University is focused on using business to create a better world.
As an AACSB-accredited business school, the College is among the top five percent of business colleges worldwide, providing programs and career support services to more than 2,500 undergraduate and 1,300 graduate students. Faculty help students across our top-ranked on-campus and online programs develop the knowledge, skills and values to navigate a rapidly evolving business world and address global challenges with sustainable business solutions. Our students are known for their creativity, work ethic and resilience—resulting in an undergraduate job offer and placement rate of over 90% within 90 days of graduation.
The College’s highly ranked programs include its Online MBA, which has been ranked the No. 1 program in Colorado by U.S. News and World Report for six years running and achieved No. 16 for employability worldwide from QS Quacquarelli Symonds. The College’s Impact MBA is also ranked by Corporate Knights as a Top 20 “Better World MBA” worldwide.
