Hearing a mix of languages was commonplace for Everet Bluth, who grew up speaking both Spanish and English on his family’s farm in a Latter-day Saint settlement in northern Mexico. Life at home, Bluth says, “evolved around family, church, work on the farm, school, and sports.” He says he had a typical childhood—except that he started driving farm equipment when he was eight.
After a year at BYU–Idaho and a mission to southern Mexico (he skipped attending the MTC and went straight into the mission field because of his fluency in Spanish), Bluth transferred to BYU. “I’d already decided on going for a degree in business management,” he explains. “I took an operations analysis class, which I fell in love with because it’s highly analytical and highly quantitative. I love math.”
After graduating from BYU Marriott in 1982, Bluth enrolled at Texas Christian University for his MBA. He and his wife, Alisa Hurlbut, decided to settle permanently in Carrollton, Texas, after Bluth earned his MBA. Bluth took a position as a manufacturing systems analyst with Texas Instruments. He later joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, where he was promoted several times before becoming senior operations consultant in 1990. That same year, he received a US Treasury award for distinction in financial systems improvements.
At this time, Bluth began to notice that his ability to speak Spanish was slowly slipping away due to lack of use. To help maintain his Spanish fluency, he took a part-time job translating documents for Industrial Relations International (now IRI Consulting LLC), an employee-engagement survey company. After several years, Bluth got an unexpected phone call: the company’s owner asked Bluth if he’d like a job as COO and director of research. “They offered me a position that nobody else in the company wanted,” Bluth says, “and I thought that was an interesting way to sell it.” But that didn’t deter him. He took the position in 1996 and acquired the firm in 2009.
Around the time IRI Consulting changed hands, Bluth and his team were working on gathering data for a global employee-value proposition (EVP) for McDonald’s Corporation, which Bluth considers some of his best work. An EVP, he explains, is “a statement that a company will make to communicate to prospective employees what they can expect from their experience with that company.” Bluth’s team surveyed ten thousand people from thirty countries in thirty-two languages, analyzed the data, and made several recommendations. The resulting EVP “is still in effect today and continues to be one of McDonald’s decision-making criteria assessing all strategic initiatives,” Bluth says. “No other project I have done has had such a broad and lasting impact.”
Being his own boss has been a great experience for Bluth. “The challenge of being self-employed is you’re more in control of your own career and your employer is now your customer,” he says. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being self-employed.”
He adds, “My career has taken me to every continent (except Antarctica) and twenty-nine different countries. Who would have ever thought a farm boy from a dusty, small-town farming community would see so much of the world? That experience has enriched my life in many ways.”
Bluth, who has three children and six grandchildren, loves to spend his free time camping, hiking, woodturning, Scouting, and doing anything that reminds him of his farming heritage.
