Jennifer Orton Wilkinson is the daughter of Ray and Dorothy Orton. She grew up in St. George, Utah, where she developed a wonderful friendship with her future husband Tyler Wilkinson during middle and high school. Jennifer attended Dixie State College, where she danced as a Rebelette and was voted copresident by her teammates. She has great appreciation for her experiences at Dixie, where she graduated with an associate of science degree. In 1994 she married Tyler in the St. George Latter Day Saints temple, and they now have five beautiful, smart, and especially perfect children.
Jennifer loves raising children and has developed a true appreciation for being a stay-at-home mom. She loves home life, traveling, and anything that involves her husband and children—even camping.
Tyler Wilkinson grew up in St. George, Utah, where he attended Dixie High School and garnered all-state honors in football and baseball and won the 3A wrestling championship in his weight class. There he also met and began dating his future wife, Jennifer Orton. During the spring of his senior year, shortly after signing a letter of intent to play both college football and baseball, Tyler broke his neck in an automobile accident, leaving him a quadriplegic.
Following his accident, Tyler earned his associates degree and graduated from Dixie Junior College. He then completed his bachelor’s degree at Southern Utah University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was recognized as the university’s Most Outstanding Business Student.
While attending college, Tyler continued to date Jennifer and they were married in the spring of 1994. Events of Tyler and Jennifer’s lives are told by National Football League Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young in the film Tyler: A Real Hero. The film has been aired both nationally and internationally and has resulted in Tyler sharing his message of faith and perseverance more than a thousand times with professional, civic, and church organizations around the world.
Tyler lives in St. George, where he is a partner and vice president in the firm Soltis Investment Advisors. He and Jennifer have been married for twenty-one years and they have five wonderful children.
Linda Clemons, the CEO of Sisterpreneur, Inc., is a global speaker and expert in sales and nonverbal communication (“body language”). She teaches women, men, and corporate clients the strategies to communicate and persuade more effectively by learning to “see the invisible and hear the inaudible.”
Linda’s personal values are her set of beliefs and ethical guidelines that have allowed her to gain clarity about what she stands for. They have played a tremendous role in her happiness, success, and, most important, inner peace. These personal values have allowed her to interact harmoniously with those who share them.
McKay Christensen is the president of Melaleuca, a $1.2 billion consumer products company with hundreds of thousands of employees and marketing executives. In that role McKay speaks to audiences around the world about leadership, teamwork, perseverance, and personal performance. In his current position and his past leadership roles with Fortune 500 companies, he has led diverse teams in marketing, sales, and management.
McKay has written numerous articles on career development, leadership, and business management and has coauthored a book on career development. He has an MBA and a PhD in organization and adult learning.
As part of his doctoral work, McKay led groundbreaking research on how adults learn and find happiness. This research, one of the most comprehensive quantitative studies of its kind, reveals how people can learn to be happy. His research and publication experience includes topics such as servant leadership, transformation as adults, and lasting change. McKay has a heartfelt passion for helping others reach their full potential, and he currently teaches strategy management courses at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University.
McKay was born on Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona, the son of a fighter pilot. He grew up with seven brothers and sisters. Without much money and a lot of mouths to feed, McKay’s parents taught their children to work at an early age; whether delivering newspapers, cleaning horse stalls, or working in the local flour mill, hard work was part of everyday life. At the age of fifteen, McKay was run over and crushed by a fourteen-ton harvester in a farming accident that left him with a broken leg and back, a crushed pelvis, two collapsed lungs, and a dozen other broken bones. He spent months recovering.
As a college student McKay learned to speak Japanese, and he has lived and worked in Japan. He is an avid runner who has completed numerous marathons, including the Boston Marathon several times. He learned to fly-fish as a young man living in the Rocky Mountains, and he still loves to escape to the South Fork of the Snake River for a day of fishing.
McKay and his wife Jennifer are the parents of five children.