No curriculum. No staff. No roadmap. Just four walls, some furniture, and a deadline, for a child development center serving the West Virginia National Guard.
She figured out payroll. She managed a kitchen. She ran HR. She built it from scratch. And then she realized: every single one of those skills was completely transferable.
That moment of clarity set off a career that wound through fintech startups, private investment firms, and scrappy small-company HR, before landing her at one of the most storied financial institutions in the world. Today, Elle is the Senior Vice President of Benefits for North America at BNY (Bank of New York Mellon), overseeing healthcare, pharmacy, leave, and wellbeing strategy for employees across the United States and Canada.
In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Elle to trace the full arc, from kindergarten classroom to enterprise benefits strategy, and unpack what it actually takes to build a career out of skills you didn't know you had.
They discuss:
The moment Elle realized the classroom wasn't for her, and how her brain kept pulling her toward the operational and administrative side of education instead
What it was like to be handed an empty building and told to create a school and a business simultaneously: with no team, no template, and six months on the clock
How she identified payroll, budgeting, benefits administration, and people operations as transferable skills and used them as a bridge into HR
The leader who taught her to fail fast and learn fast: and how that philosophy still shapes the way she leads her team at BNY today
Her years at Pineapple Payments, where she was employee number ten, grew with the company through rapid M&A, and saw it through a successful acquisition by Fiserv in 2021
Why she deliberately sought stability at BNY after years of startup intensity: and what surprised her about finding a culture of innovation inside a centuries-old institution
How CEO Robin Vince has shifted BNY into a hub of innovation, including a company-wide AI hackathon that invited every employee to pitch ideas
Why Elle believes the healthcare benefits landscape is approaching a boiling point: and how she is thinking proactively about what comes next for employers and employees alike
Her core advice for women earlier in their careers: stop calling your strengths soft skills, and start learning how to translate and sell them
Elle Mills is proof that the career you build rarely looks like the one you planned: and that the skills you pick up along the way, even inside a National Guard childcare centre in southern West Virginia, might be exactly what takes you to the top.