Former Sam’s Club Chief Member Officer Tony Rogers is moving to a new industry as chief growth officer of Keller Williams and its holding company Kwx, the company announced today.
The 16-year veteran of Walmart held top marketing roles for the company in China and the U.S. before most recently assuming duties as top marketer for its Sam’s Club unit. He left in February just as the club chain was launching its first Super Bowl ad and delivering strong growth, with fiscal fourth-quarter comp sales up 10.4% and membership up 9.1%.
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Austin-based Keller Williams is the world’s largest real estate company by agent count and also largest in the U.S. by units and sales volume, and it’s also on a roll. The publicly held company’s agents closed 1.3 million transactions, up 9.1%, and $532.2 billion in sales volume, up 30.6%, in the U.S. and Canada in 2021.
“I felt like I had accomplished what I was going to accomplish there” at Walmart, Rogers said in an interview. “And we have built a really good team at Sam’s Club.”
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In talking with Kwx CEO Carl Liebert and key members of the Keller family, Rogers said he was impressed by the “caliber of the people and the culture that they talked about,” which he compared to the strong culture at Walmart.
“Every industry now is being changed and disrupted by technology,” Rogers said. “Getting in and understanding how to win in that environment is really fun. And that’s one of the things I learned in retail in the last decade. And I felt that same energy here, that same, excitement, that same entrepreneurial spirit.”