Full Tilt Forward

From pocket change to corporate change, Stephen Wiehe ’86 BE reflects on a career started one quarter at a time.

By Dan Knapp

A gentle summer rain falls on Little Lexington, the stately 14-acre horse farm on the north side of Raleigh, North Carolina, where Stephen Wiehe ’86 BE and his wife, Juliet Sadd Wiehe, have lived for the last dozen years. Stephen unlocks the door to the workshop built perpendicular to the main house. The far end of the building hums with his woodworking hobby: rows of clamps hanging from the walls, a table saw lined with a whisper of sawdust, precision machines — so many of them — await the next project in the artisan Xanadu. Stacks of lumber, including some impossible-to-find American elm, are tucked neatly along walls and under work benches — wood he’s been transforming into bedroom sets and other furniture for the couple’s Sanibel Island vacation retreat, which is being rebuilt from the ground up after it was swallowed by eight feet of water during Hurricane Ian.

Stephen, who retired in 2016 as CEO and president of SciQuest (a software company specializing in e-procurement, inventory management and accounts payable automation), discovered woodworking decades ago and has taught himself the craft, which provided a cathartic distraction from the pressures of leadership throughout the years.

“I started watching Norm Abrams and ‘The New Yankee Workshop’ when we were living in Massachusetts,” Stephen recalls. “I was like, ‘I think I can do that.’ I started making furniture, and I found I liked it because it’s very, very binary. It either fits, or it doesn’t. The table is square, or it isn’t. All four legs sit on the ground, or they don’t. Any CEO will tell you that things are seldom so black and white. You get all the hard, intractable problems. You often don’t know if your decision is the right one, and you spend a lot of time thinking through that. I could come home, and I could build furniture and decompress.”

Over the years, Stephen has built hundreds of pieces of various sizes. But woodworking isn’t the only passion tucked inside the workshop.

The other side of the building is equally as personal for Stephen. The ultimate mancave — complete with a quartet of attention-grabbing chandeliers that complement the rustic, bi-colored wood-paneled walls — harks back to the earliest days of his business career. Inside, more than two dozen vintage pinball machines sit patiently for the flip of a switch, when bulbs will blaze, bumpers will ding and steel balls will rattle back to life.

If woodworking gave him calm and order, pinball offered chaos and the thrill of chance — a perfect complement to the skills that would define his career.

One by one, Stephen powers up each machine in his collection. He once had as many as 70 machines in the room but winnowed the number to just his favorites. Games by industry giants like Bally’s and Williams slowly begin to come alive as motors whir and solenoids click. They’ve sat undisturbed for the better part of the year, inaccessible due to the overflow of custom furniture built on the other side of the workshop. Now that movers have transported the completed furniture to their new house in Florida, Stephen has a chance to indulge in the hobby that sparked his enterprising spirit.

READY PLAYER ONE

It was the early ‘80s, the era of “Thriller,” legwarmers and Cabbage Patch Kids. Yuppies and Gen Xers were looking for new forms of entertainment and diversion. After years of being considered a form of gambling and outlawed in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, pinball machines were finally legal — and had become mainstream and wildly popular from coast to coast.

“I had a friend who was in the pinball business back when I was going to UK,” recalls Stephen, who was raised in Lexington and graduated from Tates Creek High School. “I worked in a model airplane shop, and he was a gentleman who came through the shop on a pretty regular basis, so I got to know him pretty well. I ended up joining a frat, and we were always struggling to pay the bills, and one of my friends said, ‘You ought to put pinball machines in. You’ll probably make a lot of money.’”

The budding businessman mulled the idea, and with pinball machines and video games all the rage, he saw a chance to turn a friend’s suggestion into a calculated gamble that just might pay off.

“I put one in, and by the time I was done, I had them in most all of the fraternity houses on campus!” Stephen chuckles.

Stephen notices that the “Wizard of Oz” machine hasn’t booted up correctly. He nonchalantly says he’ll need to work on it later. Since he started his collection in the early 2000s, he’s become adept at repairing and refurbishing his classic games despite any formal training or engineering background. He recounts a conversation with his father, UK Professor Emeritus of Social Work Vernon Wiehe, about how he acquired his skills.

“My dad’s 91 years old,” Stephen says, “and we moved him to Raleigh — he’s down in North Hills — and he asked me what’s on my to-do list this week. I told him I needed to replace the chlorine generator on my pool. He’s like, ‘How do you figure that out?’ I told him I just read the instructions and, of course, there’s YouTube. It’s the same thing for learning how to repair pinball machines. I look at it, and I usually figure out how to fix it.”

“I think, fundamentally, he was probably meant to be an engineer because he does all this stuff with his hands,” adds Juliet. “He’s very mechanical and spatial.”

NO RISK, NO REWARD

Stephen’s knack for spotting problems and engineering solutions became the cornerstone of his career. He went on to helm several companies, building them up and ultimately selling each for substantial profits. At SciQuest, for instance, he stepped in while the company was hemorrhaging $8 million a month and, as CEO, transformed it into a recognized leader in the industry.

“I have that kind of mind where I can sort of see how to fix things,” Stephen says with equal parts humility and candor. “That’s what’s made me successful. As I reflect on my career — why I’ve been successful — it’s because I’ve been willing to take risks.”

Stephen says that, reflecting on his career, almost every job he accepted involved a reasonable degree of risk. Even starting

his own business in college, installing pinball machines and video games, wasn’t a guaranteed success. Walking around the UK campus with a backpack full of change and pulling out rolls of quarters to pay for dinners on dates soon became less about scraping by and more about realizing he had a knack for spotting opportunity — and the nerve to act on it.

After working for GE in the aircraft engines division in Cincinnati and the plastics division in Massachusetts, he became president and CEO of Multinational Computer Models, which took him to the other side of the Atlantic.

“My first software company was the one we started in London, and that was treasury management software for large corporations — think Quicken for Fortune 500s,” Stephen explains. “It was all about cash management, foreign exchange and debt management. We built that up — I spent five years in London, and our son was born there.”

Stephen and his blossoming family moved to the Tar Heel State to take over the company’s U.S. operations before selling it to SunGard Data Systems in the late 1990s.

“To be clear, I’ve never started a software company,” Stephen grins. “I’m typically the adult that they bring in after somebody has an idea.”

After the sale to SunGard was finalized, Stephen became president of DataFlux, which focused on ETL — extract, transform and load — technology that allows data to be easily moved from one database to another. Under Stephen’s leadership, SAS Institute acquired DataFlux in June 2000.

By the time the opportunity at SciQuest came along at the start of the millennium, Stephen, who considers himself “a pretty good problem solver,” had already been the CEO of two software ventures and looked to his wife to gauge whether taking over an underperforming company created out of the dot-com boom made sense for their family and his career. She didn’t pull any punches.

“I said, ‘If you take it and you fix it, you’re the hero…’” Juliet, a former vice president at GE, recalls, laughing. “‘…if it crashes and burns, well, it was already in the toilet anyway.’”

Stephen completely overhauled the crippled company by eliminating waste, building a leaner workforce and introducing a new business model. Juliet recalls that the dramatic shift in staffing raised security concerns, but ultimately the streamlined business was stabilized, sold to a private equity firm for more than half a billion dollars in May 2016 and rebranded as Jaggaer.

Stephen retired soon after.

STEPPING UP AND GIVING BACK

Although the couple is officially retired, they have a lot on their plates to stay busy. When Stephen is not building furnishings that rival anything you’d find at Restoration Hardware, he’s sitting on the board of directors for various organizations, not to mention achieving his childhood dream of a pilot’s license with IFR (instrument flight rules) and commercial certificate, and flying his own plane on ‘Angel Flights’ aiding people in getting to and from important medical appointments. His bride of nearly 40 years — an avid horsewoman — works part-time at a local saddlery, helping customers with advice on horse care, training and outfitting of their equine endeavors.

Retirement hasn’t slowed Stephen’s love of a good challenge. Some days, the problems are less corporate and more domestic: like who to root for when Kentucky faces off against Duke University, Juliet’s alma mater. With a Wildcat in the house and a Blue Devil across the table, even a simple matchup can turn into a lively exercise in strategy and compromise.

When asked who they root for when the two rivals play one another, Stephen deadpans, “It depends on where we’re seated.”

While it may be a house divided when it comes to sports — daughter Stephanie attended Duke, son Andrew studied at Wake Forest — the couple is always on the same team when it comes to giving back. They’ve established an aquatics scholarship at Duke for promising swimmers and, in 2019, created the Wiehe LEADS Scholarship, which has opened doors for deserving students to attend UK while easing the financial burden for others. Among the nearly two dozen Wildcats who have benefited is Jacob Miller, a native of picturesque Summer Shade, Kentucky, and a member of the inaugural cohort of recipients.

“Thanks to the LEADS scholarship, I was able to pay off my loans within a year of graduating, which helped me achieve life goals beyond my career,” says Miller, who graduated in 2023 from the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering with a computer science degree. “I’m now happily married and financially secure, and that is, in part, due to the Wiehes’ LEADS Scholarship.”

Stephen says that his family’s decision to give back to UK was an easy one.

“We’ve gotten to know (UK President) Dr. Capilouto well — he’s even done a fundraiser here at the house — and we were really impressed with him,” says Stephen. “The second thing was that we see the LEADS Scholarship program as a catalyst for breaking the cycle of poverty. You’re getting kids who are firsttime students, the first kids in their family to go to college. There are so many students who, even with all the loans, just can’t make it, and for me, for Juliet, it’s all about making other people’s lives easier and breaking that cycle.”

Stephen confides that he gets a little choked up when he hears stories about the young lives his generosity has benefited. He says that he spent hours reading up on the LEADS recipients on a flight back from Europe.

“The stories were all so heartfelt,” says Stephen, remembering UK’s impact on his own life and career. He especially recalls a management class taught by Professor Jack Blanton, calling it “probably the best class I had at UK.”

“It was practical. It was thoughtful. It was challenging,” he remembers.

Stephen says that years later, after he started his career at GE, moved to Massachusetts, then England, then North Carolina, he’d often return to campus to speak with Blanton when he was in Lexington visiting family.

Stephen passes along to students some of the advice he received that he found necessary in his own career. Specifically, Stephen says communication is key to any successful endeavor.

“When I came out of UK, I was under the impression that to be successful, you have to be really smart, and I would tell you today, I think to be successful, intelligence is important — it’s just not number one,” Stephen explains. “It’s probably number two, three, or four. Number one, especially as a leader, is having people skills, being able to get people to buy into what you’re trying to do, being able to communicate with them. The way I think of it is that everybody has an electrical socket and my job is to find a way to plug into them, to connect to them, and once I can connect to them, I’m able to communicate why this is important to them.”

Back in his workshop at Little Lexington, white fences stretch just beyond the windows and horses move across the now sun-filled fields, a pastoral calm set against the soft glow of pinball machines. He started the collection after returning from England, chasing the carefree fun he remembered from his college days. Now the machines — including “The Simpsons,” “Addams Family,” “Star Trek” and “Funhouse,” the oldest in his collection — line the walls, staring back like cheerful rivals, ready for another round. For Stephen, the appeal isn’t just in the blinking lights — it’s in the risk of each shot, the chance to tilt the table in his favor. It’s the same instinct that’s guided him in business and in life: take the risk, play it smart and enjoy the game — one quarter at a time. ■