Ivan Squire, '97, From Missionary in South Africa to Financial Analyst at Ford Motor Company

Ivan Squire pictured with wife, Jennifer, and daughter, Isabella

Ivan Squire has traveled far afield from Jepson Hall, but he has never lost sight of some core values he shared with many of his classmates, such as a commitment to serve others and practice ethical behavior. Values which his faith reinforced, said Squire, a practicing Mormon.  

Squire graduated in May 1997 with majors in leadership studies and Spanish and entered the MBA program at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, a few months later on a full academic scholarship sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. After completing his first year in the MBA program, he, like many young men in The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints, took a hiatus to serve as a missionary.  

Mormon missionaries typically undertake a two-year assignment at their own expense, something Squire was willing to do based in part on his firsthand experience with missionaries, he said. He was an 18-year-old high-school senior living in Chesterfield County, Va., about 20 minutes from the University of Richmond, when Mormon missionaries came knocking on his family’s front door.  

After learning about the Mormon religion from them, Squire, who had been raised Baptist, decided to convert. So a number of years later when he had the opportunity to serve as a missionary, he welcomed the chance to share his faith with others, he said.  

The church gave Squire intensive training and then assigned him and a partner to a two-year stint in South Africa. His mission work combined service and proselytizing, Squire explained. Typically he and his partner volunteered during the day when most people were at work, doing anything from making home repairs for the elderly to visiting the sick and dying in hospitals. They would spend time discussing their faith with both church members and nonmembers during the evenings and on weekends.  

Although South Africa had begun repealing apartheid laws in 1990, many vestiges of the system of racial segregation remained and few communities were integrated when Squire arrived in 1998. “We saw the rich-versus-poor dichotomy everywhere we went,” Squire said. He described many people’s lack of education and access to health care as major issues facing the nation.  

“Every black African belongs to a tribe and every tribe has its own language,” Squire said. “Even though English is taught in the schools, many people, particularly adults, have never attended school and don’t know how to speak English.” In an effort to address the lack of education, Squire tutored people in English, reading and basic financial literacy.  

Like so much of the African continent, the specter of AIDS looms large in South Africa, with approximately one out of every five adults infected with HIV. “A lot of people didn’t like to talk about it,” Squire said, “but you knew what was going on when you attended a funeral for a nine-year-old. I attended more funerals during the two years I was in South Africa than I have during the rest of my life. 

“One day I was standing talking to a guy who suddenly became very dizzy and almost fell over. He didn’t say he had AIDS, but it was very apparent. We had to deal with a lot of cultural roadblocks when it came to health-care issues.”  

His experience in South Africa reminded him of a Jepson class he took with Richard Couto where he learned about the abject poverty and lack of access to health care in Appalachia, Squire said. He also learned about the importance of giving back in many of his leadership studies classes. “When you can help people in those kinds of situations,” Squire said, “it gives you a sense of satisfaction that’s worth more than any paycheck.” 

After spending two years as a missionary in South Africa, Squire returned to finish his MBA degree at Brigham Young University, graduating in 2001. As things turned out, his Ford Motor-sponsored scholarship did more than help him get his MBA degree. It helped him get a job.  

“Because I was attending graduate school on a Ford scholarship,” Squire said, “I got to meet a lot of Ford executives. They liked my grades and they liked me, so I had an in with the company.” He started working as a financial analyst at Ford’s corporate headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, immediately following his graduation.  

At first Squire analyzed financially distressed suppliers for Ford. More recently he has been analyzing raw materials, such as steel, copper and aluminum.  

Although he credited his graduate coursework with giving him the technical expertise to perform his job, his Jepson education has contributed greatly to his ability to think critically and to work successfully in groups, Squire said. But even more relevant to his job, the countless presentations he made as a Jepson student helped him hone his public-speaking skills. “Those presentations taught me how to communicate a point clearly to a group of people,” Squire said. 

Squire also reflected on the challenges of working for one of America’s largest corporations—Fortune magazine ranked Ford Motor Company number five on its 2006 list of Fortune 500 companies. In his role as a financial analyst, he must prepare financial statements accurately to avoid the fallout experienced by companies like WorldCom and Enron as a result of falsifying financial documents, he said.  

“When you’re looking at millions, even billions, of dollars,” Squire said, “ethics becomes extremely important. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act [that passed in 2002 in the wake of a series of corporate financial scandals] has changed the financial landscape, and I think that’s a good thing. Companies needed to be more forthcoming and diligent in their financial statements.” 

In addition to a promising career, Squire also enjoys a fulfilling home life with his wife, Jennifer, and two daughters, three-year-old Isabella and seven-month-old Katie.