by Blake Herzog
Readers have seen Elaine Earle’s name in the pages of Golden Corridor LIVING since it launched as Golden Corridor ROX! Magazine in October 2013; but many people don’t actually know Elaine and how she got to where she is. Quickly rising from a traditional college student at University of Arizona, having grown up in Tucson and graduating high school there to becoming a Certified Public Accountant, working for a large “Big 4” accounting firm, traveling and working around the world, having twin boys, buying, selling and building businesses with her husband Rock’s foundation of businesses in Casa Grande to veering into personal fulfillment goals such as running her first marathon.
Her life has included some lows with the meteoric highs, but she has persevered as a mom to her twin sons and grown a business empire with her husband Rock Earle, the founder of ROX Group and a longtime investor in western Pinal County. As CEO of ROX Group as well as ROX Media, Elaine helps steer the family businesses to continued success while embracing her passion for travel, family and personal goals.
Her boys are now high school seniors, so she looks back to her past and ahead to the future.
Golden Corridor LIVING: I know you grew up in Tucson. Are you a native Arizonan?
Elaine Earle: I was born in Trenton, New Jersey. Both of my parents are from Pennsylvania and my dad is a retired city traffic engineer. He got a job first at the City of Trenton. There are four kids in my family and three out of four of us were born in Trenton. Then when I was about 4, my brother had a lot of health issues, a lot of breathing problems, and it was thought that he needed to be in a warmer, drier climate.
So, my dad got a job at the City of Tucson as their traffic engineer. I did all my schooling there and I was in the top 5% of my graduating class at Tucson High School, and earned the Regent’s scholarship, which paid for me to go to the University of Arizona.
I finished U of A in four years, so I graduated when I was 22 with an accounting degree. And I was also top of my class there as well, and was the only one recruited from the U of A by the “Big 4” accounting firm KPMG in Phoenix to go work for them. I think they picked maybe three people in the state for their next starting class.
Golden Corridor LIVING: Why did you choose accounting?
Elaine Earle: It was just sheer luck. No one in my family did business or accounting. It was probably from Tucson High School, I took an accounting class. Literally green bar paper, all handwritten accounting. I just found it fascinating. I decided to study accounting, and I never wavered. The fall semester my junior year is when I got my job with KPMG. So halfway through college I was already guaranteed a job. And, in my senior year, I got married.
We moved to Phoenix and I started with the firm in the fall. I sat for the CPA exam that fall as well and passed it on my first try. After two years with KPMG, which was the experience requirement to get licensed, I became a CPA and am still actively licensed today. I loved it and gained a lot of diverse experience with the firm. I ended up spending seven years with KPMG altogether.
Golden Corridor LIVING: Is that when your interest in international travel took hold?
Elaine Earle: I never really traveled as a young person. My family did a lot of camping, a lot of things close by. There weren’t really a lot of resources to go traveling. But one of the things that really sparked my interest about working for KPMG is that they were in more than 100 countries. When I got recruited, I met some partners that had worked in the London office, and I just had these fantasies of doing that. After two years with the firm I got my first foreign assignment.
I went to Sydney, Australia for three months. I’d have to say that experience was pretty life changing. I was working for a partner from London, and I was talking to him one day and he says, “Well, why don’t you go to work in London for two years?” I came back home from Australia and after a year sold everything I owned, even my car. Whittled down everything I owned to a few boxes that I put in my parents’ garage and I moved to London for two years.
My very first assignment in the London office, in the year 2000, was in Lloyd’s of London, that iconic building that’s in downtown London. And I worked on the top floor, which has a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the London Eye, and the river and everything else. It was spectacular. And while I was sitting there, the partner on that job had a job in Switzerland, in Zurich. Two months later, I’m assigned to Zurich from London. For a year, I left on Monday morning and flew to Switzerland, and on Friday evening flew back to London. And from Switzerland, I did a lot of traveling.
And then when I was done with that, I came back to London and finished out my two years and decided to come back home to the United States because I thought that by the time you’re 27 or 28, you should start getting practical. So we came back to Phoenix.
My husband at the time finished his master’s degree at ASU and got a job in Sacramento, California. I was still with KPMG, and I moved with them to Sacramento. But I had such large-company experience from working in Sydney, London and Zurich, and the Sacramento office only had mostly farm clients. I didn’t really fit in, so the San Francisco office used me more than the Sacramento office.
By the time I was with KPMG about seven years, I decided to work for a local client just in Sacramento, just to end the commute. One of my insurance carrier audit clients actually was two minutes from my house. They offered me a corporate controller job.
So overall, I was with that company for a total of almost seven years also. In 2007, I had my twin boys, Chandler and Christian. I got divorced at the same exact time and became a single mom of premature twins.
It was really difficult. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t keep my career and have twin boys by myself, and I had no family in Sacramento. So during my maternity leave, I moved back to Tucson where my family is, and worked my job remotely, part-time. Then my brother-in-law, Sgt. Tate Lynch of the Casa Grande PD, died in the line of duty two days after I got to Arizona.
Golden Corridor LIVING: That must have been devastating.
Elaine Earle: My parents were retired and decided to move to Casa Grande to support my newly widowed sister because she had three kids aged 10, 8 and 6. And I had the baby twins, so I decided to move to Casa Grande and live there too. We all kind of congregated in Casa Grande, even though none of us were really from there. It seemed like a good place to stay for a few years while the boys were so young.
Golden Corridor LIVING: It was a place where you could all gather to sort of heal from everything that happened.
Elaine Earle: I worked remotely for two years until the company was acquired by another company and I was laid off, which was totally fine with me because the boys were 2, they were getting into everything and were a handful. I just became a stay-at-home mom. It was a big change; I just raised the boys for a few years.
At that point, I wanted a little bit of a break, I put them in preschool six hours a week. I just wanted a little bit of peace.
At the same time, someone from church told me that ROX Group was looking for a bookkeeper. And I said, “OK, but first of all, I don’t want a job. No. 2, I only have six hours, and that’s my time. No. 3, I’ve never heard of ROX Group. And No. 4, I’m not a bookkeeper,” because there’s actually a pretty big difference between an accountant and a bookkeeper.
So I had this job interview with this guy named Rock Earle. I never really even saw the ad, but I emailed and I said, “OK sure, I’ll interview.” And then I typed out three cancellations and almost hit send before the interview because I was like, “What am I doing? I don’t want a job!” But I had already arranged for my parents to babysit the boys so I could go to this interview. Little did I know that was my future waiting.
I started working for Rock in 2012, and he was going through some mergers and acquisitions, so some of my accounting skills came into play with that. And at the time when I started working for ROX Group, there were literally maybe one or two employees, total, in addition to the real estate agents who worked at ROX Real Estate.
During this time, I worked on the three-way merger between ROX Real Estate, the locally owned Century 21 and Coldwell Banker and also worked on the acquisition of a locally owned insurance agency. I built out an accounting team and hired a bookkeeper because after all, I was not a bookkeeper! Rock and I started laying the foundation of a diverse business environment including a management company, real estate brokerage, insurance agency, travel agency and media company.
And in 2013, we just got married one day after work, at the justice of the peace. Literally 11 months after going to work for Rock, we’re married, and we never dated for 10 of those months. Never had coffee, never had lunch. I went in to work and then I had to leave and get the boys.
Golden Corridor LIVING: That must have been some month!
Elaine Earle: We just realized that it was meant to be. It was a magical time and we never questioned the direction of our lives or the businesses. It all just seemed right, and it still is!
And then a month after that, we got married again on the beach in Hawaii, just the two of us. It was spring break, and it was still only the two of us and a photographer and officiant. And we just told the boys, “Hey, mama got married, and instead of calling him Mr. Rock, you can now call him Daddy Rock.”
They were 5. They said, “OK.” And then they went on to doing what they do. So, in some ways it was very blessed. With the divorce being when they were born, they don’t have any memory of it. They hardly have any memory before Rock, so this is what they know. So anyway, it was just a very magical time.
Also in 2013, Bea Lueck was one of our lead real estate agents, but she wasn’t an employee for the company yet. She helped as a volunteer on the magazines that were started by Rock to advertise the various ROX businesses. We decided that the magazines either needed to grow or go away, and we decided to grow them. Bea and I became partners in crime on that, and we became known as “Thelma and Louise.” We expanded the media to Flagstaff, Prescott, Sierra Vista and even tested out California with a couple magazines. And the one that ended up winning out of all of them was Prescott, where ROX Media now has an office.
I had always been a salaried employee, working for somebody, so marrying and getting to know Rock, who’s always been an entrepreneur, was an adjustment, but it was a great adjustment. And it turns out that I discovered all kinds of entrepreneurial skills that I didn’t know I had.
Golden Corridor LIVING: What were some of those skills you discovered?
Elaine Earle: Well, over the years, I worked on the three-way merger for Coldwell Banker, which is now back to the name ROX Real Estate. We bought the insurance agency; and I later sold the insurance agency. We grew the magazine from scratch, and now it’s a prospering company that has an office in Prescott — that was all just sweat equity.
And after some adventures with a local business group involved in construction, almost four years ago now, we bought Rent-A-Can, a Casa Grande-based porta-potty company. We bought that through a business broker, but I did all the mergers and acquisition work for all of these. We’re always looking for opportunities. To this day, I manage about 45 different company books within the ROX Group. Some of them are real estate or land partnerships. We have almost 40 employees now and approximately 25 independent contractors working for us.
And now the boys are 17, and both work for ROX Group. Chandler wants to be an accountant just like me and he works in our accounting department. Christian works on the media, and he updates all our websites for content, all our magazines. We do believe that our kids need to go out and get outside experience. But for right now, it’s working out great.
Golden Corridor LIVING: Right. And you’re all working out of your home in Colorado Springs. When did you guys move there?
Elaine Earle: It’s four years ago now. We still maintain a home, and all the businesses in Casa Grande and Prescott, but we always wanted to try living somewhere else. We went on road trips, looking for places. In 2020 a magazine came up for sale in Colorado Springs. We checked it out, and we had already visited before.
And COVID was a great time to move because the boys were in online school, and they weren’t talking to their friends in person anyway, so it was easy to slide out. And we thought we wanted to move to Prescott, but they didn’t really want to move there, for whatever reason. And the minute we mentioned Colorado, they were all over it. They had never even been to Colorado. We decided to not buy the magazine but move anyway.
We work from home, which gives us a lot of flexibility. Once a month Rock goes to Casa Grande, and once every three to six months I go there. We’re always in touch. The boys are at the Air Force Academy High School, and I’d say that whole experience has been life-changing for them.
And I took up running. I never ran before; just ran my first half marathon one year ago and my first full marathon in September. It’s beautiful here, and there’s a lot of wonderful hiking.
I think we’re never going to own any businesses in Colorado and just enjoy living here. Like I said, we still have our home in Casa Grande. We’re now looking at sending the boys to university in Arizona.
I always dreamed of going places when I was young. In college, I used to go to the study abroad office, pick up all their pamphlets, read them all, and then throw them all away, because I had a scholarship and I couldn’t do any of that stuff. I had to stay the course.
When I met Rock that was an immediate point of common interest. At this moment, Rock’s been to about 90 countries, and I’ve been to about 65. But when I met him, I was probably at about 15 or 20. We’re just two unusual people where we’re very interested in discovering things. And when I was younger, I was kind of criticized for that, almost told I was a nomad. I couldn’t sit still.
When I married Rock the boys were only 5, and we went to Hong Kong that year. We still traveled, and I would say we were insistent on it, even though we had small kids. We started including the boys in our trips around age 10, and we took a family gap year and did home trades with foreigners for two months, Germany in October and Spain in March.
The next year, in 2018, Bea and I took the boys to London, and then the next summer we took them to Sydney. Then in 2020 COVID hit so we took a little bit of a break. In 2023, when they were 15, we enrolled them to do a semester abroad for a duration of six months.
Golden Corridor LIVING: They must have loved that.
Elaine Earle: Chandler went to Adelaide, Australia, and went to an international school there for sports. And Christian went to Valladolid, Spain, and he was fully immersed in Spanish and came home semi-fluent. And Rock and I traveled every other month of the six months that they were gone, and we went to another 17 countries or something like that.
I think it’s matured the boys and given them a better perspective. Aside from the semester abroad, the boys have also gone to Europe 4-5 times with us, Australia 2-3 times, Northern Africa, and when they were 15, we sent them on their first solo international trip to Japan to visit a foreign exchange student from there we hosted for a school year here in Colorado Springs.
As we’re looking at their college options, we’re seeing that there’s some study abroad programs. Right now, they’re kind of back into life as regular teenagers focused on their senior year, football, track, graduating, girls, all of that. But I think they’ll always have international friends.
Golden Corridor LIVING: OK, can we share anything about the future of ROX Group in Casa Grande?
Elaine Earle: Well, for us right now, ROX Group currently has a residential real estate brokerage and a commercial real estate brokerage. We have ROX Media in both Prescott and in Casa Grande. And then we have a port-a-potty company. It’s now Rent-A-Can Site Services and has become our largest company by far. It’s quadrupled in size since we bought it, and we’ve expanded into fencing, dumpster rental, water and other construction site services.
I’m spending my time right now going to investment conferences, paying attention to what other kinds of mergers and acquisitions are possible, and it might be in a field that we’re not in. But also, we’re kind of gearing toward empty nesters. We have only one more year with the boys in high school.
We now have a home in Colorado and a home in Casa Grande. So between our homes, we’re going to snowbird a little bit back and forth and probably have a little bit more flexibility for some pocket trips a week here and there. I don’t think Rock and I could ever just stay home for a year or even three months or a month. Rock is still very active with his land investments in Pinal County, so he’s very busy with that, which keeps me busy too.
I don’t think that we are done with mergers and acquisitions though and do believe that it is the quiet before the next growth period for ROX Group. Our experience in buying Rent-A-Can was a good one, and I see more of that in our future, perhaps in an industry that we have never thought of.
Golden Corridor LIVING: And going back to your healthy lifestyle for a minute, congratulations on finishing your first marathon! How did it feel?
Elaine Earle: On Saturday, Sept. 28, I finished my first marathon and it was one of the happiest days of my life. I was happy because my husband Rock and our boys came out to see me and designed a creative sign that read “My Mom is faster than yours!”.
I didn’t do as well as I thought I would and would like to try another one. The one that I ran in Colorado Springs is at a high elevation, over 6,000 feet, and has an almost 1,000-foot elevation change. The route is also 80% on a dirt trail, which is a little harder at least for me. I am contemplating signing up for an Arizona marathon so I can test a full marathon on asphalt at a lower altitude to see how I do. I already have a good training base to improve my time.
After that, I think that I will go back to just the joy of running, cross-training and being a pacer for half and full marathons. I likely will only run a competitive marathon, competing only with myself, or half-marathon a few times per year.
Golden Corridor LIVING: Right. OK. Well, I am looking here at some of the things that we haven’t covered. What has it been like to see Casa Grande and Pinal County grow over the years? Just the striking, just the amazing population growth, and the development of the city? Is that part of what keeps you guys involved? You want to be a part of this community as it really grows up into something it hasn’t been before?
Elaine Earle: Yes, definitely. Rock started investing in land in Pinal County in the late ‘70s. And he always saw that as very strategic. At some point, Phoenix will be built out and Casa Grande will be discovered. It has the two major interstates, it has the rail, and he just saw the opportunity.
And it took longer than he expected, but it’s happening now. When I’m in Casa Grande I use the community rec center for example, and it is nice to hear that Hobby Lobby and Jersey Mike Subs and things are coming that weren’t there before. Casa Grande did have a wave of development pre 2008, and then things went away because everything was kind of slow from 2008 until more recent years.
So it is nice to see his wisdom and strategic investing finally come to fruition. It’s what he always saw. And I think it’s just the beginning because Casa Grande is just so perfectly situated between the two major cities.
We can’t have all these services like a Sam’s Club or a Costco or car dealerships and all these things if there’s no people around. So development has to happen.
Golden Corridor LIVING: Right. Even for me, I lived there just in the late ‘90s basically. But going back there now and just seeing all these streets loaded up with cars is really, really amazing. And how the City has to try and keep up with all the traffic and everything. It’s striking.
Elaine Earle: But if you want better stores and better schools…
Golden Corridor LIVING: Right.
Elaine Earle: Better everything, you have to have the population growth. And both of us, both Rock and I, are surprised it took so long for Casa Grande to get discovered in that way. And it really is becoming the industrial development headquarters for a lot of things such as Lucid and a lot of the things that are happening on the west side of town. And our local port-a-potty company benefits from this growth.
Golden Corridor LIVING: Any final words for this interview?
At the end of the day, it’s like, why did I pick accounting? Why did I end up where I am? I’d have to say, I mean, I didn’t have anybody growing up saying, “Become an accountant. There are jobs all over the world.” I had no idea. I didn’t even know what accountants did when I graduated with a degree.
I just got extremely lucky and blessed at the same time, and I got the right experience, and met the right man that I married, and have two really great boys who are smart in their own right and they’re going to go off and do great things.
