NEIGHBORHOOD STORE ASSOCIATION

Vol. 12 No. 1

BY JAN JACKSON, Freelance photographer and writer

GRESHAM, Ore. –  A long way from her small home-town of Raymondville, Texas,  Leathers Enterprises, Inc. President and CEO, Lila Leathers-Fitz, oversees the company she built with hard work. 

Leathers-Fitz, who credits her late mother for her work ethic, further credits the company’s success to the 90 to 100 employees working a combination of service stations, convenience stores and card lock operations in 27 locations throughout the state of Oregon.

“My maternal grandparents were the first members of our family to come to Oregon and they encouraged my mother to follow them,” Leathers-Fitz said. “She raised the four of us by working in the fields and my three brothers and I learned to work along with her. She also taught us how to set goals for everything and how to achieve them. We worked first for a down payment on a house and then moved on to the things we needed to go in it.

“When we got old enough to go to school, she gave us the option of continuing to work with her or going to school and it wasn’t a hard decision for us to choose school. I lived in Boring but went to high school in Sandy and Sandy was where we started our first service station.”

Leathers-Fitz, who started by pumping gas in her first service station, has long since removed herself from that end of the business. Though currently President and CEO of Leathers Enterprises, Inc. and on the board of directors for Oregon Neighborhood Store Association, she has also served as Western Regional Vice President for Petroleum Marketers of America, past President of Pacific Oil Conference, past President of Oregon Petroleum Marketers Association, past Oil Heat Commissioner for the State of Oregon, past President of Gresham Area Chamber of Commerce and has served on the Transportation Committee System Citizens Advisory Council for Gresham. Her involvement in ONSA is dear to her heart.
“Because everything is evolving, there is always so much to learn,” Leathers-Fitz said about today’s business climate. “Just having ONSA as a place to discuss and face some of the issues before us is vitally important. There isn’t any way that a one store operation can make an impact on the legislature, but ONSA with its united front can.”

Today, with son Brent as General Manager and daughter Kathryn as the company’s CFO, Leathers-Fitz knows she can retire when she is ready.

“As long as I still love doing what I do, I’m going to continue,” Leathers-Fitz said. “I love the traveling, the meeting people all across the country, and I even love the challenges. For pleasure, I read books or listen to books-on-tape on anything and everything, I garden, I ride horseback and I trap shoot, like I did yesterday. We just won our second cruise to the Greek Islands for outstanding sales and performance and I’m looking forward to going on that.

“Am I ready to retire? Well, as long as I keep getting to work with wonderful people and I continue to like what I do, probably not.”

For more information about Leather’s Enterprises, Inc. call 503-661-1244, e-mail leathers@teleport.com or visit http://www.leathersfuels.com/aboutUS.html

More to come!!!!!