TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1075818
"I didn't grow up really around [horses], except for my dad always dabbled," recalled Barton, who said her father, Richard, has owned a few horses for decades. "I would occasionally go to Del Mar in the summer if I could with my dad for a race, but I didn't know anything about it." Barton knows more than she lets on, but first she got a market- ing degree, then went on to get her MBA. She began working for her father's company, California Packaging, in Southern California. Richard Barton's clever slogan for the highly successful company? "Thinking inside the box." "We actually just celebrated our 40th year of being incorporated," said Barton. "My dad started it in 1978. We manufacture corrugated packaging and sell it, so we have a branch in Ontario, California; we have a warehouse in Mira Loma, California; and then we have a factory in Salt Lake City, Utah, where we're actually converting paper into corrugated packaging." Barton's family has a passion for the packaging business, but Bar- ton felt there might be something more out there for her. "It was great, but I still had a little bit of aspiration to do something else," said Barton. "I was involved in legal things that were going on in our company and thought I wanted to go to law school, so I took the LSAT. I didn't really study; it was just kind of on a whim." Barton did "fairly decent" on the test and got a few offers from law schools. As she was touring campuses, she had an epiphany. "I went to a Barrett's sale with [my dad] at Pomona and he was looking at yearlings," remembered Barton. "I came in and I made a spreadsheet for him to organize and go look at the barns. I asked him why he was dog-earring [catalogue pages]. 'You're going to go back and forth too many times. Let's make a list and figure out what horses you want to look at in each barn, what the stud fee of the sire is, let's get some information so we know when we go over there.' I remember I made that list and my mind was blown." That was the driver that got her into the horse business and kept her from law school.