Meet The EMBA Class Of Entrepreneurs: Executives Today, Founders Tomorrow 

Victoria Wells
UNC Kenan-Flagler 

Venture name Stay Wells 
Date of founding: 2024
Program: UNC Kenan-Flagler Executive MBA Program 

Tell us about your career background: My career largely has been centered on sales, business development, and helping growing organizations turn ideas into sustainable growth. I’ve often been drawn to roles where something was still being built, whether that meant helping establish a sales function, entering a new market, or creating structure and momentum within a growing organization. This passion led me to create Stay Wells with my husband, AJ Wells, and pursue an Executive MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler with a concentration in entrepreneurship. 

What is your business/venture? Stay Wells is a furnished rental real estate company. Together, my husband and I acquire properties, convert them into short-term and mid-term rentals, and manage the guest experience. Our vision is to create consistently comfortable accommodations that make guests feel like they are “finally home” while visiting university towns. 

We currently have 10+ locations in Auburn, Alabama, around Auburn University, and Gainesville, Florida, around the University of Florida. Our aim is to expand into similar towns across the southeast in future years. Of course, we have our eyes on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Virginia! 

What inspired you to found this business? Higher education has been a large part of both my husband’s life and mine. I went to undergrad and received a master’s degree at UVA while AJ went to undergrad at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. With both of us being close to our parents, there were plenty of times when our parents needed to stay in the college town area for longer than a day or two, whether it was my family supporting me when I played Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde” during our show weekend or when my husband had surgery from a football injury and his mom needed to stay nearby for three weeks while he recovered.  

We found that university towns with locations close to campus were often overwhelmed with student rentals while hotels were typically focused on one-night stays. Families visiting for extended periods of time were overlooked, and that’s where our niche lives. 

Why did you enrol on the EMBA? My husband and I took the Weekend Executive MBA Program together. We actually found out he was accepted to the program right before we left for our honeymoon. I attended a Carolina Women in Business event at UNC Kenan-Flagler the weekend we got back, and fell in love with the business school, and decided to apply, too. Being in the program together has been really fun and a blessing. He and I lacked quantitative backgrounds, having both been English majors, and we knew that to acquire and launch larger properties with Stay Wells, we had to get a better understanding of the math that went into the scale we wanted to achieve. The EMBA format allowed us to keep working our full-time jobs and prepare ourselves to supersize our startup. 

How has the EMBA helped you/your business? We received tremendous mentorship from several professors throughout the program. Running a business makes it easy to apply each and every lesson to what we are actively building. When we finished our first year and began to specialize in what courses we could take, we were very lucky to have three hands-on entrepreneurship courses with Professor Ted Zoller. He challenged nearly every assumption in our business and helped us rebuild Stay Wells around a much more focused, mission driven model.  

Because of the EMBA and the mentorship we received, we had the confidence to buy our largest property yet, which is a $2M multifamily standalone building with six townhouses in Gainesville, Florida. We are now in the process of converting each one of the townhouses into a furnished rental, and we are off to an amazing start with early results.  

One of the ways the EMBA has helped us with those early results came directly from Ted’s New Ventures Discovery class. He suggested we start to find our audience early and post listings for the Gainesville property, even before we were finished renovating. Because of Ted’s advice, we received early signals on the ideal customer profile of our townhomes. As a result, we received direct feedback on what the customers were looking for, made significant adjustments to our design plan for the renovations, and have developed a design that our guests love. 

What’s the one thing about the EMBA that you think is undervalued? One of the most underrated benefits of an EMBA is the confidence it gives you. When I attended a women’s event at UNC Kenan-Flagler, one of the alumni shared that she felt the EMBA was the “greatest gift I’ve ever given myself.” As I finish my last courses and get ready to walk across the graduation stage in October 2026, I find that I agree wholeheartedly. I now walk into conversations without questioning whether I belong in the room. I have a much stronger understanding of the financial, strategic, and operational topics being discussed. I recognize the value that others have long seen in me. Most importantly, I put greater trust in myself. The EMBA has reminded me that I am capable of doing difficult things and of building something meaningful. 

 What’s next for your business? Right now, we are focused on successfully launching our Gainesville property, our largest expansion to date. At the same time, we are evaluating opportunities in similar towns, refining our operating model, building strong local teams, and preparing to launch a new website this fall. 

Would you recommend the EMBA to other potential entrepreneurs? If yes, why?  Yes, without hesitation. The EMBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler is built for entrepreneurs. Even students who have not yet launched a company can develop a venture concept and use it as a living case study throughout the program. That allows them to practice thinking like an owner and decision maker rather than only imagining how they might perform in that role. This mindset immediately makes all of the coursework relevant, rather than constantly trying to apply marketing skills to your daily finance job, for example (although I’ve found doing that in tandem helps, too!).  

As an entrepreneur, the Weekend Executive MBA Program has given me tremendous confidence and sharpened capabilities that I had not previously developed as fully. In the past year, I’ve gone into conversations with private equity firms and investors that I would have been intimidated by, but I now have a stronger level of sophistication due to the lessons I’ve learned from the program. As a woman building a business in an industry where ownership, finance, and real estate conversations can still be male dominated, that confidence and fluency have been especially meaningful. Also, when trying to raise money, having the credibility and network of the UNC Kenan-Flagler alumni behind you can really help put some of the typical concerns at ease.  

Finally, what I recommend about an EMBA, in particular, is that the executive format lets you get to know leaders at many different stages of their careers. From budding entrepreneurs to VPs of large companies, learning from such diverse perspectives in a safe space helps you grow as a person and create a stronger business. I know I am going to cherish these relationships and memories for life and celebrate successes with the connections we’ve made. 

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