Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Resilient Landreaux
Entergy Arkansas chief brought back to state following two tragedies.
When the big Entergy Arkansas trucks rumble by, they are usually manned by burly men in hard hats. But a petite blonde is ultimately in the driver’s seat.
At 46, Laura Landreaux is president and chief executive officer of Entergy
Arkansas.
The mother of three oversees a company that has about
711,000 customers in 63 counties.
How did she accomplish that at a relatively young age?
“I don’t know the answer to that,” she says. “Entergy has given me a lot of opportunities to show that I can add value to meeting their objectives. And I attribute much of my ability to do well at this company to the opportunity that they have given me.”
Hugh McDonald, who spent 16 years as president and CEO of Entergy Arkansas, says Landreaux earned the position through hard work, talent and experience.
“From my perspective, as well as, just about everybody she works with believes she is capable, very bright and she’s a quick study,” says McDonald, who retired in 2016. “Every problem that we threw at her she executed to near perfection.”
Landreaux is a Little Rock native with a law degree and a background in regulatory legal work. But it was two tragedies that brought her back to Arkansas.
Landreaux was a student at Vanderbilt University but spent the summer of 1993 interning for then U.S. Sen. David Pryor and the State Department.
That summer, her father, Vincent Foster Jr. killed himself in Fort Marcy Park. At that time, Foster was President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel. His death set off a firestorm and rumors swirled that his death may have been a murder, triggering
“People say you don’t want to plan out your life because it’s not going to turn out the way you planned it anyway. So I don’t ever plan what my future may look like in five or 10 years because I have seen that you can’t control that.”
investigations that became part of what was widely known as the “Whitewater scandal.”
Two independent counsels concluded Foster’s death was a suicide.
Foster and Clinton were childhood friends from Hope.
“I watched Laura grow up and blossom in a loving, supportive family. Even as a young girl, she was clearly intelligent, mature and very observant,” Clinton said in an email. “I’m proud of but not at all surprised by her success, and grateful for her commitment to Arkansas. Entergy has a fine leader.”
After Foster’s death, Landreaux’s mother, Lisa, decided to move the family back to Arkansas. (Her mother has remarried and is now Lisa Moody.) Landreaux decided to transfer to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, to be closer to her mother and two brothers — Vince Foster III and Brugh Foster.
At UA, Landreaux fell in love with fellow student Greg Raffaelli. After they married, he moved to Phoenix to work in finance. She joined him after graduating from the University of Arkansas School of Law and took a job as a lawyer for a utility company.
By 2007, the couple had two young daughters — aged 2 ½ and 14 months — when he went out to dinner with friends. The phone call from one of Greg’s friends came after she went to bed — Greg had choked on a piece of steak.
“He said ‘Something happened to Greg. We’re not really sure what happened but he collapsed. And we’re taking him to the emergency room. And I don’t think it’s good.’”
Greg was taken off life support four days later. He was 33.
Her mother helped Landreaux overcome the heartache of losing her first husband.
“She essentially was in the same boat I was in when I was in Phoenix which was ‘Now what do I do? So I am going to move home.’
“It wouldn’t have happened had she not already gone through it because what she demonstrated to me — without me even knowing at the time — was hope. She had gone through hell and back and gotten remarried and continued to have a fulfilling life.”
Landreaux says her mother provided a road map of sorts that helped her deal with her grief. “It’s not the kind of road map that everybody hopes for, but it was fortunate.
“People say you don’t want to plan out your life because it’s not going to turn out the way you planned it anyway. So I don’t ever plan what my future may look like in five or 10 years because I have seen that you can’t control that.”
Her mother is not surprised by her success.
“Laura always had the right combination of intelligence and drive,” Moody says. “She made note cards for nearly every test she took and carried them around in a shoebox. When she fell behind in Algebra,
she double-downed and graduated in the math honor society.”
STARTING OVER
Landreaux held a memorial service for friends in Phoenix and another service in her husband’s hometown of Texarkana, Texas. John Landreaux was a friend of Greg’s and he stopped by the house to pay his respects. While there, he offered Laura his frequent-flier miles to get her and her girls back to Phoenix after the funeral.
She wrote him a thankyou note but did not see him again for a year and a half.
Laura Landreaux had friends in Phoenix but did not have the support system she needed to help take care of her daughters — Libby and Catherine. So she moved back to Arkansas.
“And, of course, I was devastated, and I wanted to be with my family,” she says.
She was quickly embraced by friends and family in Little Rock.
“There’s such a sense of warmth and family with everybody here whether they be childhood friends, family friends or college friends,” she says. “It has been nothing but the most welcoming atmosphere.”
At the funeral, she ran into a friend whose father worked at Entergy. He told her the company was looking for a lawyer in Little Rock.
Two weeks after the funeral, she interviewed for the job. She admits she doesn’t know how she made it through the interview, saying she was in shock and “you go through the motions.” But she knew she needed a way to provide for her family.
She had to go through a series of interviews before she was offered a job as a regulatory lawyer a few months later.
About 16 months after Greg’s death, she ran into John Landreaux again at another funeral in Texarkana. John, a business owner and entrepreneur, told her he
would be traveling through Little Rock, and they made plans to go to dinner.
“Then I went to visit him in Austin the following weekend, and he moved to Little Rock the Monday after that,” she says. They began dating in July 2008 and were married in March 2009. Their son, Patrick, is in the third grade.
ENTERGY
Landreaux’s office is on the 40th floor of the Simmons Building with sweeping views of downtown and the Arkansas River. In all, Entergy takes up 10 floors of the building.
She spent her first five years at Entergy as a regulatory lawyer. From there, she was promoted to manager of regulatory affairs and then vice president of regulatory affairs. Next, she was promoted to director of finance, though she does not have a financial background.
“It was one of those opportunities where you challenge yourself, you step outside your comfort zone and you try to master a new language and use the skill sets you’ve gained in the other areas.”
After less than a year as director of finance, she was promoted to president and CEO of Entergy Arkansas. She is one of two female CEOs at Entergy. The other is Sallie Rainer, president and CEO of Entergy Texas.
While Landreaux directly supervises about 55 employees, the company has about 3,500 employees throughout the state.
“This is certainly my dream job,” she says. “My dream is to be successful in this position. So, I haven’t quite achieved that yet. … I’ve been here one year. There’s a lot left to do.”
Landreaux flies to Entergy’s corporate headquarters in New Orleans at least once a month to attend meetings. And there are a lot of meetings in Little Rock, too. When there is a power failure in Arkansas, she can be found at Entergy Arkansas’ offices on Louisiana Street in what is called the “war room.”
She lost power at her house in the Heights area of Little Rock in April when a storm came through and blew over a tree in her neighbor’s yard. And no, the CEO does not get preferential treatment.
“It’s not any quicker in my backyard than it is in yours,” she says. “The same restoration undertakings have to take place. You’ve got tree removal and poles to set back in the ground and wires to be strung.
“We get critical care facilities back online first, and then … we look at what we can do that gets the most customers back on at one time.”
Since she took over at Entergy Arkansas, she has been through two significant thunderstorms — July 2018 and June 2019.
“I have incredibly talented specialists who execute our restoration plans flawlessly,” she says. “My concern is always ensuring we are doing the best we can in customer communications.”
HOME LIFE
Despite having a 24-7 type of job, Landreaux says she maintains “a healthy work schedule.” She drops her kids off at school at 7:30 a.m. and gets home between 5-6 p.m. She cooks dinner most nights.
And then there are the kids’ sporting activities. Libby plays tennis, Catherine plays volleyball, and Patrick plays almost every sport. She goes to all of their matches and games. “I make a lot of time for family.” She shares that view with her employees.
“I don’t want my employees to feel guilty about having to sacrifice family events that are meaningful because of work,” she says. “There’s a lot of opportunity to be able to get your job done outside of an 8 to 5 schedule with remote technology.”
Sandy Henry and Landreaux grew up together. Their mothers are best friends and both families had vacation houses on Lake Michigan — where they were next-door neighbors.
Henry says she and Landreaux are like sisters. Both women gave birth to their oldest children on the same day.
Henry recently started back to work after a 15-year absence as the volunteer coordinator at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Cancer Institute. Landreaux has always been a working mother.
“She’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. She can juggle three kids and be the CEO of a company, and she doesn’t miss a beat,” Henry says. “If she is not on a work trip or at work, she is on the soccer field or the baseball field or at the tennis courts. She just never stops, and she handles it all so gracefully.”
Henry was a bridesmaid in Landreaux’s first wedding. The two women were college roommates. And Landreaux is the person Henry turns to for advice.
“She’s intelligent and wise beyond her years. She sits back and takes it all in. We can be sitting there and talking and doing kids stuff, and two minutes later she can go into CEO mode and take business calls,” Henry says.
Juggling a house full of kids and work life seems to be a family trait.
“When I look at how she approaches her job today, she shows the same determination and work ethic as her father,” her mother Lisa Moody says. “But the children have always come first. She many times has to juggle her schedule to fit theirs, and she handles the pressure as well as anybody.”
After this interview, Landreaux went to her office to retrieve a scrapbook of pictures and stories about her father. The book included his Oct. 9, 1988, story in High Profile. At that time, Landreaux was a sophomore at Mount
St. Mary Academy. In it, Foster told the story about the time he had the house to himself when his family was away at vacation or attending summer classes.
At first, he enjoyed the quiet. But after two days, he was ready for his family to come home. When his wife and children returned, “It was as loud as teenagers can be, as messy as teenagers can be. A whole lot of activity — people coming and going, trying to figure out what everybody’s schedule is, without much success. But I much prefer that confusion to silence.”