The greatest advice Julie Evans ever got was given to her as she was quitting a job.

In an interview at the Women in Retail Pavilion at Shoptalk in March, Evans — the chief marketing officer of Omaha Steaks — spoke with Sharonda Weatherspoon, a Women in Retail advisory board member and the head of retail operations, client development and transformation North America retail at Ralph Lauren, about how that advice changed how she thought about work/life balance.

Evans said she didn’t set out to be the CMO for the country’s largest distributor of steaks and gourmet food products. She spent 12 years there in the early 2000s, leading consumer direct marketing and “working her tail off.”

When she left the company in 2012, Evans said the CEO at the time sat with her for a long time because he wanted to understand why she was leaving. She told him she was having a hard time disengaging from the job.

“I was at Disney World with my kids and I was on my Blackberry,” she said. “I couldn’t disengage, and I felt I wasn’t present enough for my family and I thought if I just dialed back and got a different job, I could solve all of those problems.”

Her CEO responded with: “It’s not going to matter what briefcase you take home. Unless you change, you are always going  to have this problem.”

Evans said after that, she made the decision to have “life balance.”

Seven years after leaving Omaha Steaks, she came back to the company as senior director of direct-to-consumer marketing. She was promoted to vice president and chief marketing officer in June 2020.

She said she still struggles with the concept of “life balance” because she loves what she does. She sometimes rationalizes overworking by telling herself she’s setting a good example for her kids about what it means to work hard.

“I don’t call it work-life balance,” she said. “I call it life balance. There’s not a compartment that’s work; there’s not a compartment that’s life. You just have to blend the two where it works for you.”

Women in Retail members can watch the entire interview with Evans and Weatherspoon on-demand now. Not a member? Apply today!