Driven to success: Alumna Kelley Earnhardt Miller shares her personal story

For Kelley Earnhardt Miller ’94, her new book is both educational and therapeutic. In it, Earnhardt Miller, daughter of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt and a businesswoman in her own right, offers important lessons for being successful in business.

But writing “Drive: 9 Lessons to Win in Business and in Life” also helped Earnhardt Miller heal as it forced her to delve into her complicated relationship with her father, which shaped her as a businesswoman.

“As much sadness that I have about my childhood and the things that I wished and hoped for from my dad in terms of just more of an emotional relationship with him, the interesting thing is that I do credit a lot of the way we were raised with our success with JR Motorsports and the way we run our businesses,” Earnhardt Miller said.

Growing up, Earnhardt Miller said she was put in a position of having to “drive and survive,” do for herself and take care of her younger brother, Dale Earnhardt Jr., with whom she has always shared a close relationship.

She spent two years working on the book with writer Beth Clark, deciding to write it after a conversation with the publisher of her brother’s book. But Earnhardt Miller, who is co-owner and vice president of JR Motorsports, knew any book she wrote had to include her relationship with her father.

After their parents divorced and their mother, Brenda Earnhardt Jackson, lost her home to a fire, Earnhardt Miller and Dale Jr. lived with their father. She writes of a hard-nosed father who was more involved with racing than with his children.

At the time of his death in February 2001, they had not spoken in three weeks.

“I spent most of my life really yearning for a relationship with my dad, only to lose him when I was 27,” she said.

But over the years, they had worked to repair their relationship. Earnhardt Miller started college at UNC Wilmington, but later enrolled at UNC Charlotte because her father begged her to return home so they could spend more time together. She received a degree in business administration, with a concentration in production and inventory management, from UNC Charlotte.

While studying at the University, she worked for a hospitality and events company that did some work for NASCAR. Often, she would find herself in the same room with her father.

“I would be in meetings with him but not as his daughter,” Earnhardt Miller said. “I was on the other side of the table working for a business.”

Earnhardt Miller, who drove late model stock cars in the mid-1990s, offers advice in her book about being authentic and approachable, managing emotions and balancing work and life.

She couldn’t share her story of becoming a successful racing executive without sharing the tribulations that got her there. She went through years of therapy to gain closure on her issues with her father, and she has found that his legion of fans can relate to her. Many have told her that they had similar relationships with their fathers.

“It was done in a respectable way,” Earnhardt Miller says of her book, “and I think people realize that we’re all human at the end of the day.”