This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
In the modern era of global commerce, it’s difficult to imagine a worse year than 2020 to launch a company supporting travel and tourism. Historically, events disrupting life and travel were common enough, but usually in local and temporary patterns that made it easy to forecast the conclusion.
Then came the first week of March 2020: the week Sarah Lehman and her Zartico co-founders rolled out a data analytics platform built for destination marketing organizations, or DMOs — the people whose job it is to attract visitors to tourism-dependent communities.
The launch went smoothly enough. But days later, the world’s airplanes sat on the ground, hotels went dark, conferences were canceled and restaurant doors locked shut. The U.S. Census Bureau found that of all the industries impacted by COVID-19, employment dropped more than five times the average for entertainment and recreation, accommodation and food services, and the arts, when comparing 2019 and 2020 data.
The way this story usually ends is in the demise of a startup with otherwise brilliant prospects. For Lehman, it’s a story about one of many pivots in a career defined by successfully managing unexpected change.
“I thought I was going to be a lawyer, or maybe go into politics. I never had business in mind,” Lehman says. “While I was at Boston University, I started working at a startup that banked umbilical cord blood to be used as an alternative to bone marrow. I was the second employee hired by a female founder, and she opened my eyes to the world of business. I saw her do so much good by combining the medical industry with her love of business, and I was hooked. She took me to a women-in-business seminar at Harvard Business School, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
A pivot toward leadership
Lehman began work on an MBA at Harvard, the youngest member of her class. There, she met her husband, Paul Lehman.
“And so we set off on this crazy entrepreneurial journey,” Lehman remembers. “Growing up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I expected my career path would be very linear. It turned out to be more like a Eurail Pass, where I get on for a while, get off, stop for a minute or stay for a while.”
Lehman went to work for Amgen, where newly minted MBA graduates did the business equivalent of clinical rotations, spending time in marketing, sales and market research. Leaning toward marketing, she took a Manhattan-based position with Pfizer in 2001, promoting Zyrtec.
That’s when Lehman began her professional pivot toward leadership.
“Early in my time at Pfizer, an extraordinary VP of sales pulled me aside and said, ‘Sarah, you’ve got something. People want to follow you. Lean into it.’ He gave me “The Oz Principle,” a book about personal accountability built around four steps: See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It. That was a monumental moment for me,” she says.
Lehman decided to prioritize her career and postpone starting a family. Then 9/11 happened, and she pivoted. “Priorities become very clear when you live in Manhattan and experience 9/11,” Lehman says.
After giving birth to a daughter, Lehman moved to Utah to join her husband, who had purchased a company in Ogden called Edge Products. After selling that business, they invested in ENVE Composites, a manufacturer of carbon fiber bicycle wheels, also in Ogden.
“That’s where I first cut my teeth as CEO,” Lehman says. It was a baptism by fire. ENVE was on the verge of bankruptcy.
“Nothing is more motivating than the fear of financial ruin, and so we doubled down. I didn’t sleep. I pulled all-nighters at least twice a month. And while I produced a lot, I was less effective than I thought. I needed more time in between the stimulus and the response,” Lehman recalls. “Now I build in moments of active recovery — breaks, exercise, sleep and meditation. Self-care is not a luxury; it’s absolutely essential to keep the pace.”
Under Lehman’s leadership, ENVE made a complete turnaround. Today, it thrives.
Lehman takes the rest-as-strategy philosophy even farther, informed no doubt by her experience at ENVE, whose customers include some of the world’s fastest cyclists. When asked what advice she would give her younger self, she says, “I’d tell her to train like an elite athlete. I believe magic happens at the extremes. But what separates sustainable success from burnout is strategic recovery. You need grit for the hard days, grace for the journey and a healthy dose of humor to stay grounded. Elite athletes don’t just push limits. They build deliberate rest into the system.”
“She who is the most adaptable wins. Zartico started out with a pandemic. Then the capital markets went bonkers, throwing money at businesses like ours and saying, ‘Grow at all costs.’ Then they said, ‘Be profitable right this minute.’ And then AI came on as an accelerator. The world is so uncertain and complex that as a CEO, you have to be adaptable.”
— Sarah Lehman
A new chapter: Zartico
In 2016, ENVE was acquired, and by 2018, Lehman’s work there was done. She started looking for the next challenge.
“I wanted my three kids to see their mom transform, reinvent and do hard things. So I looked for a business to be involved with, as a founder, a CEO and an owner,” Lehman recounts. “One day, two guys pitched my husband on investing in their business idea, and I listened in. By the end of their pitch, I only had one comment: ‘You guys are thinking way too small.’”
More conversations followed, and by the time they were complete, Lehman had joined as co-founder and CEO of what would become Zartico, quickly attracting the Utah Office of Tourism and Visit Salt Lake as clients.
It was January 2020. The travel industry was booming. Nobody had any reason to doubt smooth sailing ahead.
Then came March.
“We had to pivot, because Zartico was built on the premise that we would bring in and aggregate all of our clients’ information and provide retrospective reporting, looking back at what already happened. But when COVID hit, what happened in the past no longer mattered,” Lehman says. “We needed to help our clients predict what would happen in the future. And so we invested in our own data sets to provide them with predictive intelligence.”
Lehman says every DMO wants not only to attract tourists, but to attract a steady stream of them across all four seasons. That is the differentiator of Zartico’s reimagined technology.
“With year-round, level-loaded tourism, you get year-round, level-loaded jobs and year-round, level-loaded economic impact. DMOs use our tools to identify off-season growth and marketing opportunities, then measure how effectively their marketing drove that growth.”
Not only does Lehman expect course corrections in business, she embraces them.
“As a founder, you should assume your first product is flawed. The goal isn’t to launch something perfect. The goal is to learn and iterate as fast as possible. Your mission can stay consistent, but the actual product will and should change as you listen to customers and figure out whether you’re solving a real problem,” Lehman says. “There are a million things to do when you start a company. Finding product-market fit is the only one that matters.”
And getting to product-market fit is not something Lehman does from the sidelines.
“I am a very hands-on leader. I used to think that was a bad thing because you hear about the visionary leaders who just come up with their big ideas. That is not at all who I am,” Lehman says. “I believe when you roll up your sleeves and really understand your client’s fundamental challenges, how to put product and technology up against those challenges, and then build the systems to deliver, that’s where you see real disruption. That’s where vision is born.”
The adaptability quotient
Every successful CEO has a superpower. Talking to Lehman, it quickly becomes clear that hers is adaptability.
“First, it was IQ. Then everybody was talking about emotional intelligence. Now I think it’s the adaptability quotient, or AQ. She who is the most adaptable wins. Zartico started out with a pandemic. Then the capital markets went bonkers, throwing money at businesses like ours and saying, ‘Grow at all costs.’ Then they said, ‘Be profitable right this minute.’ And then AI came on as an accelerator. The world is so uncertain and complex that as a CEO, you have to be adaptable. You have to lean on your ability to read a room while understanding the future, while also managing and executing the present. In many ways, it’s never been more challenging, but in many other ways, it’s never been more exhilarating.”
That methodically adaptable approach to business also influences Lehman’s family life.
“We’ve navigated a dual-career household through a lot of twists and turns. My husband has been the anchor, and at a certain point, he rebuilt his career to support mine. I also lowered my expectations of myself in a lot of areas. My house was messy. My cookies were store-bought. When my kids were young, people would ask how it was going, and I’d say, ‘There’s a lot of crying, and it’s not just the kids,’” she says, laughing in a way that underscores the importance of difficult lessons learned more than the humor of the situation.
“What I’ve landed on is what I call an integrated life. I don’t have clean breaks between work and family. I’ve negotiated multimillion-dollar contracts from a hotel room while traveling with my son’s water polo team and snuck in lunch with my daughter between conference sessions. With today’s technology, so much more is possible. The one rule my kids do have is no phone calls in the car. Apparently, I talk too loudly.”