Hear Her Story with Sandra Sage: A Favor For a Friend

“A favor for a friend” is how Sandra Sage describes her first meeting with executives at Clemens Food Group. There was a job opening in business development, but Sage wasn’t particularly interested and certainly didn’t think she was qualified: She had 25 years of retail experience, in procurement and category management, not much of it in the meat department. Clemens, meanwhile, is a sixth-generation family owned, vertically integrated pork producer and processor.

“I certainly wouldn't have pursued this opportunity on my own. It didn't feel like it was a good match for me and my expertise,” Sage says now.

But back then, in 2012, Clemens was in the midst of a strategic overhaul, with all the challenges and promise that all-encompassing undertaking brings. A friend of Sage thought she could help Clemens’ executive team, and so Sage agreed to a meeting.

“I really thought maybe I could just help them figure out who might be a good candidate, help guide them a bit in more of a consultative approach,” Sage says.

Once she got there, however, “It became apparent to me it was really a special organization. They very much made me feel like my experience, what I brought to the table, could help them to do this,” she says. Which, in turn, led to a realization about herself, and about how many women evaluate their own professional qualities.

“When a woman looks at her qualifications, she tends to think ‘If I don't have all 12 of the 12 (listed in a job ad), I shouldn't apply.’ But that's not true.

“I would say this experience definitely taught me that so many of the skills I had were transferable,” she says. So transferable that she’s been promoted five times in almost 15 years, and is now senior vice president of sales, marketing and innovation. In several of those moves, Sage says, the Clemens executive team members were more sure of her success than she was — at first.

Take her move from a sales-oriented position to one in marketing, in January 2020. “It was something I quite honestly was nervous about, because I'm much more of a commerce-led person. Sales fit very, very nicely for what motivates me,” she says.

And, of course, she was learning the ropes through the teeth of the pandemic when, as Sage puts it, “The world got turned upside down and honestly, marketing was the last thing we were thinking about. We had no product. We had no customers on the foodservice side. We had no product for the retail customers. We had bedlam.”

On the other hand, she continued to work from the office, rather than at home, during the spread of COVID. It wasn’t required at her level, but she did not live with children or older relatives who could be more susceptible, and she wanted to be able to pitch in on the fly. Daily proximity to the senior executives, who were required to be on-site, had the benefit of boosting Sage’s visibility as well as availability to help problem-solve the hundreds of never-seen-this-before snags that arose in that period.

“I think that was probably the most pivotal change for me. I became more of an enterprise leader than a sales and marketing lead. I thought about Clemens Food Group, about our 6,000 employees, not the 25 that live in the sales and marketing world,” she recalls.

“It changed how I thought about what I want to do and the impact I want to have on the organization.”

By December 2020, Sage was senior vice president of supply chain for Clemens, another area of expertise — logistics — she had to learn on the job. The road was bumpy: Along with the metrics of supply chain management, Sage says, it was the first time she was responsible for such a large cohort of frontline employees. Furthermore, the immediate post-COVID period ushered in a wild set of demands from customers, who were eager to normalize their operations quickly and didn’t understand the complexities of reassembling the pieces of a pork delivery system.

As Sage puts it, “Supply chain is all about service to our customers. And we failed. The first year in there, we were failing consistently. It was difficult for me. I felt like I was letting my team down.”

But through this experience, she learned how much power a team actually has. Together she consulted with “the people who do it every day,” helped them understand their own competencies and solutions to these unique challenges, and brought them to the proverbial table.

And in doing so, Sage found her ultimate career purpose: To mentor mid-level managers into senior positions, a need that is particularly keen at fast-growing Clemens.

“It is all about the impact I can have helping get that VP and director level ready for succession planning. We very much like to promote from within, so being a mentor, coach, a friend, an ear to some of those younger folks to help them navigate that career path, it's very, very important to me.”