There is a particular kind of ambition that does not announce itself. It does not arrive in a limousine. It arrives, more often, in a Honda Civic with the trunk full and the gas tank counted to the dollar. That is roughly how Nicole Lauchaire got to Memphis - at 22, from Florida, chasing a job that paid less than the one she left, on the strength of a hunch she could not quite explain to anyone who asked.
The hunch, it turns out, was correct. Nearly a quarter century later she is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Retail and Direct-to-Consumer at Varsity Spirit, the Memphis company that sits at the beating center of competitive cheerleading and dance. It is a title only about eight percent of women in sports ever hold. She reached it without leaving the thing she loved when she was 16.
Most executives spend their careers trying to look like they were born in a corner office. Lauchaire spent hers proving that a corner office and a cheerleading uniform are not opposites. She wore the Varsity uniform herself as a high school cheerleader at Chaminade-Madonna College Prep in Hollywood, Florida. She cheered at Florida State. She went to the camps. Later she coached the teams. When she finally joined the company that made all of it, she was not so much starting a job as arriving at a place she had already been living for years.
The pivotal yes came early. At 22 she was offered a summer position with Cirque du Soleil in Atlantic City - glamorous, gaudy, the sort of thing that photographs well. She was also invited to apply for staff at the Universal Cheerleaders Association. One had sequins. The other had a runway. She chose the runway. It is a distinction worth pausing on, because the flashy option and the correct option are so rarely the same envelope, and most people at 22 cannot tell them apart. Lauchaire could.
In Memphis she found a mentor, Kris Shepherd, a figure who had a quiet habit of inventing the future of the industry - the routine-set-to-music, the first national cheer championship, the London parade. For a decade, from 2006 to 2016, the two were office neighbors. Proximity to that kind of mind is not luck so much as a choice you keep making, and Lauchaire made it daily. She absorbed the trade the way you learn a language by living in the country rather than buying the phrasebook.
The work piled up in the good way. She was instrumental in Varsity Spirit's 2007 re-brand. She helped launch Varsity TV, giving a televisual sport its own screen. She helped build the Varsity Brands partnership with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which is the sort of line that reads well on a resume and reads better in a hospital. She ran the social and public-relations machinery that turned pom-poms into a narrative. Ask her which achievement she is proudest of, though, and she will steer you away from the trophy case and toward the people. Titles, in her telling, are the least interesting thing about a career.
Then came 2020, which asked every live-events business the same brutal question: what are you when the arena goes dark? For Varsity Spirit the answer was existential. Roughly 60 percent of the business ran on live camps and competitions, and overnight there were none. Lauchaire's team did the only thing a marketer can do in a crisis, which is refuse to freeze. They rebuilt the experience virtually, invented formats that had not existed the previous spring, and kept a community together through a screen. Crisis does not check whether you are ready. It checks whether you will move.
She moved. She has, in fact, spent a lifetime moving. Outside the office Lauchaire has run about 20 half marathons, hiked the roughly 100-mile Tour du Mont Blanc, canoed across the Mississippi River not once but twice, and learned to ski as an adult in spite of a fear of heights she dispatched by, of all things, climbing more mountains. In 2024 she took a last-minute trip to the Paris Olympics, on the apparent theory that the best trips are the ones you did not overthink.
All of this culminated, fittingly, on a stage. In 2021 she gave a TEDxMemphis talk with a title that doubles as a personal operating system: "Burn the Boats: How to Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your Life." The premise is that comfort is a slow leak. We build routines, the routines harden, and one day we mistake the walls we built for the edges of the world. Her prescription is to make retreat impossible - to burn the boats - and walk forward into the discomfort. It is easy to say from a stage. It is harder to have actually driven the Honda Civic.
The same year, she went home to coach her old high school cheer team to a national championship, and was inducted as the first cheerleader in the school's Athletic Hall of Fame. The circle did not just close; it did a full-twisting layout and stuck the landing.
Lately she has taken to quoting the poet Mary Oliver, who asked what you plan to do with your "one wild and precious life." For most executives that would be a screensaver sentiment. For Lauchaire it is closer to a job description. She is now steering Varsity Spirit past its live-events roots into retail and D2C, a Pro Cheer League, and the first-ever National School Spirit Championships. Which is to say she is still doing the thing she said she would keep doing: things that scare her a little.
It would be tidy to call her story a fairy tale, except fairy tales tend to skip the part where you count the gas money. What Lauchaire offers instead is something more useful than a fairy tale. It is proof that the passion you had at 16 is not a phase to be outgrown but, occasionally, a career to be built - provided you are willing to say yes before you can see where the yes goes, and to keep going after everyone else has stopped.