Fleet Feet CEO knows how to ring the ‘money bell’
UNC Kenan-Flagler alumnus Joey Pointer helped the Carrboro company grow to more than 300 stores.
Fleet Feet CEO and president Joey Pointer ’00, ’01 (MAC) keeps a handheld bell on his desk as a reminder how far both he and the company have come. When he first went to work at Fleet Feet’s corporate headquarters in Carrboro in 2004, someone rang that “money bell” when the company had taken in enough cash that week to make payroll.
Pointer celebrated Fleet Feet’s 50th anniversary in 2026. (Submitted photo)
As Fleet Feet celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2026, Pointer now leads a much larger running retail platform. Fleet Feet and Marathon Sports together include more than 300 stores, 130 corporate employees and nearly $600 million in system-wide annual revenue.
Pointer’s business career began when he left his rural North Carolina home and enrolled at Carolina in the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Undergraduate Business Program. He loved it.
“Something about business and UNC Kenan-Flagler just clicked,” he says.
He stayed an extra year to earn his Master of Accounting degree. After graduation, he joined Ernst & Young’s tax consulting practice in Raleigh and worked with a wide range of clients — insurance, technology, biotech and more. Working on research and development tax credits, he interviewed the scientists and engineers making decisions.
“It was so fascinating to be on the floor to see where the action happened,” he says. “That was part of my spark of realizing I didn’t always want to stay in public accounting.”
Pointer’s wife, Ivy, was a medical student at Carolina and a serious runner. She worked part time at Fleet Feet, cashing her paychecks at the register to buy running gear.
As he learned about Fleet Feet from his wife, Pointer wondered if the company might be a good fit for him, too. “How amazing would it be to take my personal passion for leading a healthy and active lifestyle and blend that into the profession?”
The Fleet Feet parent company was tiny then: half a dozen employees. One was a nursing student in California who handled the corporate books part time.
Pointer interviewed for nearly a year before they hired him as financial manager. He found there were questions and problems nobody had answers for at Fleet Feet. He was a certified public accountant, but he would have to learn about insurance, banking, real estate and more.
Pointer has combined his personal passion for running with the business, inspired by his wife’s part-time job at Fleet Feet. (Submitted photo)
Learning the business
Once he got the accounting running right, he built an accounting service inside Fleet Feet and offered it to franchisees. Eventually it grew into a dozen dedicated employees handling accounting for more than 100 locations.
After fewer than two years, he was promoted to director of operations, and by 2012 he had become chief financial officer. The company grew just as fast, and Pointer spent a lot of time with store owners, finding and sharing good ideas, helping them all grow. In 2017 became CEO.
He’s learned to let other people make decisions, even when he disagrees.
He thought a corporate sponsorship of FloTrack, a digital media company that covers running events, to support coverage of European track and field, was a bad idea but approved it anyway. Now Pointer says his team was right. The FloTrack partnership opened doors for Fleet Feet and created new opportunities.
Pointer says his UNC Kenan-Flagler education — the broad base of business knowledge, the focus on working in teams and even public speaking — has been invaluable. His business and accounting skills are what help him run Fleet Feet well.
“Those basic fundamentals helped to shape my professional career,” he says. “We can’t provide meaningful employment, we can’t live our mission that business can and should be a force for good, if we’re not making money along the way.”
