It’s been a winding road, but Winston Crawford (MBA’05) and Sarah (Biegert) Crawford (MBA’05) have finally figured out their version of work-life balance: jobs they’re truly passionate about and lives centered on family. After years in high-powered corporate jobs, Sarah now leads her own wellness-centered business, and Winston works in business operations at Apple’s ad platform.

“We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create the life we want,” Winston says. “Life has a lot of different facets: career, personal fulfillment, family. We spent an agonizing number of hours talking about what we want to build for our family. It led us to the paths we’re now on.”

Their paths first joined in fall 2003, when the couple met at Purdue as MBA students. Winston, a Silicon Valley native, had years of sales experience at startups but wanted “to get an education on the finance and operations side of business.” Sarah came to the University after a chance meeting with Krannert’s dean of admissions in Frankfurt, Germany, while working at SAP.

By the time Winston and Sarah received their master’s degrees, their relationship was rock solid. But they were both career oriented, and their jobs took them far apart: Sarah moved to Detroit as an analyst for a company going through a bankruptcy, and Winston joined General Electric in a rotational position. He went to Connecticut and New York City for a year before finally joining Sarah in Detroit during a stint with GE Plastics.

We’re constantly tinkering and adjusting, and that leads us in the right direction.

Sarah Crawford

At that point, both wanted to make a move physically and professionally, and they decided to relocate to Silicon Valley. Winston took a job with Yahoo, and Sarah worked remotely for her company before joining him there. The pair were married in 2007.

“We went from long distance to working five desks away from each other for two or three years,” Sarah says. She stayed at Yahoo for about five years, during which time she gave birth to the couple’s two children, now 10 and 8.

Post-Yahoo life was fast and busy for both Crawfords: Sarah joined Facebook in operations and strategy, then moved to sales operations at Softbank. Winston left Yahoo for Quantcast and was recruited by Apple to run global operations for their new iAd platform from 2011 to 2015 before a chief operating officer role at Drawbridge tempted him away. “While it was a great experience, the C-suite wasn’t as magical as I thought it would be,” he says.

At Softbank, Sarah began to feel restless. “I decided to take a step back to think about what I was passionate about and spend some time with my kids,” she says. “I figured out that my passion is helping women rediscover themselves after having children.” Last year, Sarah cofounded a health and wellness company focused on education through one-on-one and group coaching. She also launched a mother-centric podcast called Valley and Beach.

Winston decided in March 2018 to rejoin Apple, where he leads the go-to-market efforts for the search ad business within the App Store. It combines several of his passions: operations, marketing, business development, and business strategy.

“We try to be aware of what’s happening and be thoughtful about how we do things,” Sarah says. “We’re constantly tinkering and adjusting, and that leads us in the right direction.”