Guilford College has a way of making big claims sound small. The College talks about preparing students for a changing world, about the elasticity of a liberal arts education, about how you can major in one thing and end up somewhere else entirely. It’s all true, of course.

But if you’re looking for a cleaner, more convincing example, you could skip the messaging altogether and just bring Elizabeth Minehart ’05 back to campus.

No, really. Give her a chair, an hour and let her talk. She’d probably start with a shrug. Elizabeth, now the marketing manager for Ziehl-Abegg – a German company that produces industrial fans and motors — oversees strategy across North and South America. It’s a job that requires fluency not just in marketing, but in people: cultures, expectations, ways of thinking that don’t always line up neatly.

It’s also not the job she imagined when she was a student at Guilford. It was the kind of realization that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but once it arrives, everything that followed starts to make a little more sense.

What Guilford gave her — what she would later lean on in rooms far from Greensboro — wasn’t a straight line. It was something closer to a reflex.  The ability to adjust. To take in new information without panicking. To sit in the discomfort of not knowing and work forward anyway.

That mattered, though not always in obvious ways. Elizabeth didn’t arrive at that understanding all at once. In fact, one of the most important realizations came quietly, almost sideways, when she was diagnosed at Guilford with dyslexia.

Looking back, she didn’t see it coming. “I was an honors student in high school, good grades, right? There was that thought that those two things don’t go together,” she says. “But in  hindsight, sure, that answered a lot of questions for me about me.”

The result wasn’t a setback. It was a kind of alignment. “Life makes a lot more sense,” she says

The diagnosis didn’t change who Elizabeth was. It explained it. The way her mind moved. The way she connected ideas. The way she could hold something abstract in one hand and something structured in the other and not feel a need to choose between them. That tendency – to move between worlds – would define what came next.

It started with a yes

Elizabeth’s start in marketing wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t even particularly intentional. It was, like so many things at Guilford, relational. She got a job at the YMCA on the recommendation of hall director Thayle Jackson ’97 — the kind of person who notices students and takes notes.

It didn’t take long to begin her climb. She was quickly put in charge of marketing and fundraising for one of Greensboro’s YMCA sites. That was it. No long deliberation. No five-year plan. Just yes. “The Y really gave me a shot,” she says. “And that was all because of knowing her from Guilford and maybe her knowing a little about me.”

What followed was a decade of learning in public. She worked her way up, eventually becoming director of annual campaigns and communication for the YMCA of Greensboro. The work was less about theory and more about feel — understanding what resonates, what matters, how to reach people without talking past them.

“When I left Guilford, I knew I wanted to do something that made an impact,” she says. “But I kind of didn’t know what that looked like.”

So she figured it out. Slowly. Imperfectly. The way most people do, though not everyone admits it.

The path widens

Eventually Elizabeth moved into healthcare, into the B2B side of a system that would become one of the largest in the country. It was a different environment — bigger, more complex, less forgiving of improvisation. But it taught her something she didn’t expect. “I got really comfortable in,” she says.

It’s a detail that doesn’t seem important until it is.

Because when she decides to leave healthcare – “it was just too big for me,” she says – she carries that comfort with her. “I mean, you don’t go to a place like Guilford and then go to a place that has 150,000 employees,” she says. “That just wasn’t the right fit for me.”

What she wanted was something smaller. Closer. Something that felt, in some way, familiar. She found it at Ziehl-Abegg. “I didn’t have any connection with the company,” she says. “But luckily, they were willing to take a shot with me.” Two and a half years later, she’s still there, overseeing all the marketing strategyfor North and South America.

If the job sounds expansive, that’s because it is.

It demands Elizabeth think beyond borders, beyond assumptions, skills, she says, she picked up at Guilford.

“I’ve never marketed in Colombia,” she says. “And so having the skill set that allows me to say, yeah, let me go on and think about this … think about it rationally.”

That’s where her Guilford education shows up. Not in the specifics, but in the approach. “The critical thinking skills that come with a liberal arts education are critical to what I do every day,” she says. “Without those … I wouldn’t be this far.”

Work without borders

The challenges Elizabeth faces on a daily basis at Ziehl-Abegg aren’t abstract. They’re practical. She works with teams in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil. She navigates differences in language, but also in expectation. In how business gets done.

“There are very different cultural references and ways to work through,” she says. “I don’t know how to market on WhatsApp — that’s actually something we’re working on this year, but I’m adapting and learning.”

There’s a moment in that line that feels telling. Not the uncertainty, but the acceptance of it. She doesn’t pretend to know everything. She builds around what she doesn’t know. “We have fabulous sales guys in each one of those areas,” she says. “I’ve built solid relationships with them … they help me with that.”

It’s not a top-down approach. It’s collaborative. It requires listening. That’s not always easy, especially across cultures.

Ziehl-Abegg is a family-owned company based in Germany, and she says there is more than time zones to manage. “As Americans, we have a tendency to kind of jump in and figure it out as we go,” she says. “And Germans are much more thoughtful and process (oriented).”

The difference can create friction. “So sometimes that very opposite way of working can cause some hiccups that you have to work through.”

At Guilford, she studied abroad in London. She learned early that her way wasn’t the only way.

“That allows me to be open to new opportunities,” she says. “To thinking through things with them, instead of telling others how to do it.”

Then she adds, more pointedly: “That American exceptionalism can easily come through. And so the liberal arts education has really helped me minimize that.”

Impact still matters

There’s another layer to her work, one that runs parallel to the professional. She spent years in the nonprofit world. That doesn’t disappear just because the job title changes.

She served on the board of Dance Project in Greensboro, a nonprofit focused on making dance accessible to everyone. She’s spent eight years with the group, including two as president, bringing much-needed structure to the organization’s finances.

But what she talks about most isn’t the structure. It’s the people.

“One of our regular sayings is everybody dances,” she says. “Meaning that no matter who you are, you can be dancing.” She mentions programs for the hearing impaired, ways to expand who gets to participate.

“Regardless of who they are, they can find joy in movement and dance.”

It sounds simple. It isn’t.

No neat ending

This spring, Elizabeth was recognized by a local business publication as one of 25 women making an impact in business in the Piedmont Triad. If you ask her now whether she could have predicted any of this, she doesn’t hesitate.

“No, not at all,” she says. Her father visited her plant recently, walked through the facility, took in the scale of it. She asked him if he could have imagined his art-major daughter working in marketing for a global manufacturing company.

“He said, ‘No’ — and he said it very fast,” Elizabeth says, laughing.

“That’s OK, because I didn’t see this coming either.”

There’s no punchline after that. No neat resolution. Just the understanding that the path doesn’t have to make sense at the beginning to make sense later. Guilford can explain that to its students, current and future. Or it can just bring Elizabeth Minehart back to campus, let her tell a few stories, and let students connect the dots.

If you enjoyed this story you'll find more like it in the 2026 Guilford College Magazine.