Forget a six-figure MBA—the path to the C-suite can begin with a forklift certification. That, at least, was the route taken by Ron Vachris, the chief executive of Costco, whose rise from the warehouse floor to the corner office of one of the world's largest and most admired companies stands as a case study in staying focused rather than job-hopping. At a time when changing employers is often framed as the surest way to get ahead, his four-decade climb inside a single company offers a different playbook.

Today, Vachris leads Costco with a compensation package worth nearly $14 million. But he never set out chasing the top job. Instead, he approached his career one step at a time, guided by advice from his father, a utility lineman.

"I wish I had the vision back in the '80s about what this industry and what this company could be," Vachris said in May 2026 at the Economic Club of Chicago. "But it rings true to my father's comments: Find this company that stands for what you want to stand for, and then the rest is up to you."

His father's lesson was simple: "Don't chase a title. Don't chase anything big. Just go make yourself your own success."

Vachris took that advice to heart. After graduating from high school in the early 1980s, he enrolled at Glendale Community College in Arizona, studying business while working part-time as a forklift driver for Price Club, the warehouse retailer credited with pioneering the club-store model would merge with Costco in 1993. Before long, he was promoted to assistant warehouse manager—and he never went back to finish his degree.

The climb continued steadily from there: he was named a regional vice president in 1999, chief operating officer in 2016, and, by 2024, CEO. It is a career rise so improbable that even Vachris himself struggles to believe it.

"Ten years ago, if you asked me if I'd be sitting here today, I'd tell you I doubt it very much," he said.

Yet his four-decade ascent was rooted in another piece of simple advice from his father: "Take the worst job in a great company, and the rest is up to you."

From Entry-Level Jobs to the Executive Suite

Breaking into the C-suite can feel like an impossible ladder to climb. But Vachris is far from the only executive to prove that a corner office doesn't always require job-hopping or a perfectly mapped career plan. Some of America's biggest corporate leaders—including the CEOs of Walmart, Nike, and General Motors—rose from entry-level jobs to the top spot after decades inside a single company. The pattern carries real weight for workers without advanced credentials, arriving as many large employers have been reassessing how much formal degrees should count in hiring and promotion decisions.

At Nike, CEO Elliott Hill began his career in 1988 as an apparel sales intern. Over the course of more than three decades at the sportswear company, he climbed through leadership roles across Europe and North America, eventually overseeing consumer and marketplace operations before being tapped as CEO in 2024.

Mary Barra has had only one company on her résumé: General Motors. She started out as a co-op student in the 1980s at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), working on the assembly line as a quality inspector at the Pontiac Motor Division. Her first full-time job was as an electrical engineer, and she later became plant manager at GM's Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant before steadily climbing the executive ranks. In 2014, she was named CEO.

Barra has said that growing up in manufacturing proved fundamental to her leadership, giving her firsthand insight into how every step of the production process shapes the final product.

Meanwhile, John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart, got his start at the retail giant as an hourly employee working in a garden center. His predecessor, Doug McMillon, followed a similarly humble path—starting out unloading trailers at a Walmart distribution center before eventually taking the top job.

Like Vachris, McMillon credited his rise not to chasing promotions, but to quietly preparing for them.

"One of the reasons that I got the opportunities that I got was that I would raise my hand when my boss was out of town and he or she was visiting stores or something," he once recalled in an interview with Stratechery.

"I then put myself in an environment where I became a low-risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job."

For Vachris and his fellow chief executives, the lesson is consistent: long careers built within a single company—grounded in doing the work at hand rather than chasing titles—can still lead all the way to the top of corporate America. With Costco, Nike, and General Motors all currently led by executives who started at the ground floor, those companies now double as ongoing case studies in how far an entry-level beginning can go.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on June 8, 2026.