For many people, one marathon is enough to last a lifetime. Not so for Gretchen Olson Montgomery.
She ran her first as an MBA student at BYU Marriott after training with her classmates. “I survived it and thought, ‘I’ll never do that again,’” she remembers. “But you catch this running bug. The more time that passes after the race, the more you think, ‘I can do it again.’”
She did Chicago in 2006. New York City in 2007. She took a decade-long hiatus from both running and a high-octane Wall Street career to raise kids, then she hit the pavement again with the goal to run a marathon in every state. Now she’s at 51 marathons and counting, on track to reach her 50th state next year. Her next goal is to run a marathon on every continent, including Antarctica.
“I’m a high achiever,” Gretchen says. “I need to be knocking down goals.”
One of her most recent victories has been especially sweet: launching and growing Gretchen’s Goodies, a bakery featuring original recipes served as portable desserts in a cup. At 70 sweet treats and counting—including cakes, cheesecakes, and pies—her on-the-go goodies are the perfect fare for customers patronizing the gas station purchased by her husband, 2004 MAcc grad John Montgomery, in his own departure from an investment banking and fintech career.
Since it opened in 2021, Gretchen’s Goodies has become a local landmark. But the route that led Gretchen from BYU to Wall Street to Tampa, Florida, has been much like a marathon: exhausting, exhilarating, and enriching. Life in Tampa is much brighter, but the pace hasn’t let up one bit as she and her family have built their lives and their business from scratch.
What Does MBA Stand For?
Gretchen was finishing up a degree in history education at Utah State University and one final barrier remained: student teaching.
While interviewing for a placement, she remembers, “I just realized, I never want to be a teacher. Ever.” Gretchen, who was raised in Paradise, Utah, graduated that semester in history and headed to Washington, DC, to intern with Utah senator Bob Bennett.
There she found some clarity. “I filed my mission papers and was called to Ukraine, which was surprising. But God put me where He needed me to be, humbled by a challenging climate, people, and language,” she explains. In Ukraine she and her fellow sister missionaries spent any spare time baking, a hobby Gretchen had picked up as a kid by trying her hand at ward cookbook recipes. “The ingredients were limited, so we got creative,” she says. Her companions also prompted her next step: joining them at BYU.
Her sister-in-law suggested Gretchen apply to BYU Marriott’s MBA program. “I don’t even know what an MBA is,” Gretchen responded. “What does it stand for?” But as long as an MBA would get her into BYU with her friends, she was game. She crammed for the GMAT and was admitted to the program.
When it came time to choose a specialty, she started with marketing—another suggestion from her sister-in-law. “I took my first marketing class by David Whitlark, and he humbled me,” Gretchen says. “He gave me my first A minus.” Gretchen soon found that finance was a great fit for her. “I really loved working with numbers. My dream job was to be in equity research on Wall Street.”
While Gretchen discovered the MBA program almost by accident, John knew from childhood that he belonged in business. “My dad was an accounting major and instilled a love of accounting in me,” John says. In fact, John was so single-mindedly focused that his friends gave him the nickname Zoom Zoom—he just couldn’t slow down.
It’s possible John zoomed past Gretchen at some point at BYU. But the two never met in the Tanner Building. That wouldn’t happen until New York City.
The Big Apple
“There are three decisions that have really set the trajectory of my life,” Gretchen says. The first two: serving a mission and earning her MBA at BYU. And number three? “Moving to New York City,” she says.
New York was a dream built in b-school. “It’s the pinnacle of success,” Gretchen says. “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. I was single. I loved to travel. You don’t get those kinds of opportunities forever.”
After many interviews and no job offers in equity research, she ended up getting hired by Zions Bank as a bond trader in Jersey City, across the river from Manhattan. “I was doing the reverse commute,” Gretchen says. “I lived in New York City, then took the train out to Jersey City.”
New York City, she loved. “I still love it,” she says. “I love every part of New York.” Skyscrapers, tree-lined streets, the fast-paced life, a temple on the upper West Side, bakeries with subway tiles. She was in her element.
With bond trading—not so much. “I was good at my job,” Gretchen remembers. “I made a lot of money for Zions, but I wasn’t passionate about it.” After sticking it out for almost two years, she caught wind of an opportunity much more her style through the city’s strong network of Latter-day Saints in finance. She was hired by Deutsche Bank as an analyst, working first in apparel retail with brands like Gap, Abercrombie, and Aeropostale, then in the food industry with Kraft, Kellogg, and Hershey. The gig was everything she’d dreamed of.
Around the same time, Gretchen moved from the Upper West Side—with its brownstones, trees, and Central Park proximity—to an apartment in the sky-scraping financial district—a 10-minute walk from her Wall Street office. And there, in the young single adult ward, is where she finally crossed paths with John.
It was not love at first sight. “He was arrogant and obnoxious, always bragging about his GMAT score—which was funny, because mine was higher,” Gretchen says. John offers no defense. “I try to be humble, but I’m not,” he says. “I was cocky and rough around the edges. But let’s be clear—so was she. She’s intimidating. She’s confident. She wants things her way.”
From the outside, their personalities read like the clash of the titans. But in each other, they found something perfect: “Neither of us could ever handle someone who wasn’t intense,” John explains. “We both have a New Yorker personality.”
As their relationship quickly grew serious, John put all his cards on the table. “I am a workaholic,” he told Gretchen. His career in banking had grueling hours, with John at the office evenings and weekends. Given her own 12-hour days on Wall Street, Gretchen understood—and she was all in.
Out of Gas
Right after the honeymoon, John went to work at the Royal Bank of Canada. The couple moved into an apartment on Wall Street itself, a quick walk from both their offices. Even with the short commute, “John would go in at 9 a.m., and I wouldn’t see him until 3 or 4 a.m. the next day. On Sundays, he would stop in the church to take the sacrament, then go back,” Gretchen says. “I felt like I was a single wife.”
She was lonely but never resentful. Before long their first child was born. Gretchen wrestled with the decision to parent from home or stay on at Deutsche Bank, which was willing to be flexible and work with her needs and schedule.
“I had always planned on staying home with my kids, but going back after maternity leave was so rewarding,” she says. Her husband soon jumped ship to a firm in San Francisco, and Gretchen felt it was the right time to stay home.
San Francisco ended up being a short yearlong stint, but it was a good fit. “We were living in Inner Sunset, just two blocks away from Golden Gate Park,” she says. “That was our playground. I would walk there every day, and the weather was awesome. It was much closer to Utah, so I saw my family a lot.”
John’s career next took their family to Charlottesville, Virginia—and, for the first time, out of a large city. “We decided to embrace the suburban lifestyle,” Gretchen says. “We bought a house, a dog, and a minivan—all those things we couldn’t have in the big cities. It was fantastic.”
They were there for ten years, in the thick of making a living and raising a family. Never one to slow down, Gretchen threw herself into her role as a stay-at-home parent. She volunteered at school and drove kids to appointments, toting the youngest in a baby carrier. To keep from drowning in Dr. Seuss, she regularly read the Wall Street Journal.
“John was still working crazy hours,” Gretchen says. “I was doing all of the grunt work with the kiddos, and that was okay.”
But eventually, at the beginning of 2020, things just weren’t okay for John anymore. Challenges at work combined with the long hours took a toll on his mental health, which evolved into a midlife crisis that landed the Montgomerys at a gas station in Florida.
Recipe for Success
John needed to get out of the corporate world. “He decided that he wanted to buy a business and see if he could apply what he had learned from his career,” Gretchen says.
The Montgomerys looked to buy somewhere with a bigger market—and more sunshine. They decided on John’s home state of Florida and began researching. Most for-sale businesses were either HVAC companies or gas stations; John preferred the latter. “He flew down to Florida and visited—I’m not even exaggerating—100 gas stations, looking for the perfect one,” Gretchen says.
He found it in Tampa. The gas station came with a restaurant space in a prime location with a strong ward and a thriving youth program. John officially traded office-building windows for a back room lined with breaker boxes.
“I hate gas stations with a passion,” John says. “I hate going in them; I hate the clutter. But our gas station is amazing because it’s ours, and it’s run the way I like it.” John went all in on cleanliness—no souvenir T-shirts or stacked boxes—and he sourced only best-selling products.
The gas station was dubbed Zoom Zoom after John’s college nickname. A clever moniker for a spot to refuel cars—but not as amusing as John’s initial jesting suggestion: Gretchen’s Got Gas. “She was not a fan of that one,” John understates. Gretchen instead lent her name to a different piece of their business: a bakery.
The Sweet Spot
It all started with key lime pie.
Years earlier, John and Gretchen had taken a Florida cruise, and Gretchen couldn’t stop raving about a piece of key lime pie she tried in Key West. John, known for taking up all-consuming hobbies, fell into a baking phase “and took it upon himself to nail that recipe for the key lime pie I loved so much,” Gretchen says.
Even though he doesn’t like sugar—and even though Gretchen hated sharing her kitchen—John concocted 65 different versions of key lime pie. In true business-grad style, he tracked every variation in an Excel spreadsheet. “He ended up with a really amazing pie,” Gretchen says.
Key lime became the first of the founding flavors at Gretchen’s Goodies. She pitched desserts in a cup—portable for travelers and layered, trifle style, for aesthetics. Gretchen adapted John’s pie recipe, stacking pieces of graham-cracker crust with filling and whipped cream. “The crunch and texture really made it phenomenal,” Gretchen says. “If we could do key lime pie in a cup, what else could we try?”
Red velvet cake. Peanut butter cheesecake. Salted caramel cheesecake. Hummingbird cake (a southern favorite with pineapple and cream cheese). “The fun part for me is being creative and coming up with different recipes and flavors,” Gretchen says.
The bakery launched in 2021, complete with subway tiles inspired by New York City haunts, with 20 original recipes prioritizing quality ingredients like Belgian chocolate and real buttercream. “I can’t stand shortening in my frosting,” Gretchen says.
John scaled the operation, translating recipes Gretchen whipped up in her 7-quart kitchen mixer to the bakery’s 140-quart industrial mixer. Once they advanced into the larger mixers, she ceded the baking to John: “Frankly, I’m not strong enough to fold in the whipped cream in such large quantities,” she says.
Locals spread the word. Gretchen’s Goodies has hundreds of Google reviews and a sparkling 4.9-star average.
“It’s been really fun to see the positive reactions,” Gretchen says. “Because my name is associated with the company, when people write a negative review, it hurts. It’s gotten better, but it’s still hard to not take it personally.”
Because the desserts are so popular, the bakery has a freight-container-sized freezer on site to store the extra inventory needed to keep up with demand. They offer 70 flavors, including some keto options. John wants to invent even more desserts, but Gretchen is looking at a seasonal menu with rotating flavors, like lemon meringue pie and strawberry shortcake in the summer and caramel apple cheesecake in the fall.
“We stand by our product; it’s a good, quality product,” Gretchen says. If something doesn’t taste right to her or to a customer, she experiments until it does.
Fast Pace
Gretchen and John enjoy the independence of business ownership and the grit it requires. But they have no rose-colored views of the startup life. John used to watch Shark Tank and dream of his own hustle. “I love owning a small business,” he says. “I’m happy that I own it. But I don’t watch Shark Tank anymore.”
“It’s a big business,” Gretchen adds. “It’s a lot of work.” Florida law requires gas stations be staffed 24/7. Especially in the first year, if an overnight employee didn’t show up, it fell on John to step in at 2 a.m.
Gretchen helps with the finance side in addition to running the bakery. “I was out of the game for a long time—12 years,” she says. “I don’t regret spending that time with my kids. I’m grateful that I still don’t have to work full-time because John picks up a lot more of that. This goes back to our very early conversations about him working crazy hours. He still does that.”
John has no desire to build a gas station empire—one Zoom Zoom is enough, though the Montgomerys are exploring expanding Gretchen’s Goodies to more locations. For now, both are happy with the pace the family has settled into.
“Gretchen puts up with me,” John says. “She keeps me in my place. She is very intellectually smart and knows baking like the back of her hand. She cares about people a great deal, but she can be honest and ruthless. With her, everything’s a strength.”
_______
Written by Sara Smith Atwood
Photography by Bradley Slade
About the Author
Sara Atwood is an associate editor at Y Magazine. She lives with her family in Orem, Utah, and likes eating cake more than running marathons.
