A Story of Impact from KW Next Gen
Bailee Crenshaw wasn’t looking for KW Next Gen. She was just in the room.
It was December of 2023 at a Women’s Leadership Summit in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where she works as a tax accountant. A speaker named Barbie Johnson mentioned briefly, almost in passing, that there was a three-month coaching program available to young adults. Bailee had never heard of KW Next Gen. She had never taken a Quantum Leap class. She doesn’t work in real estate.
She applied for the coaching anyway. She wasn’t sure she’d get in.
“I really wasn’t sure what to anticipate or if I was going to be accepted,” she says. “I remember being nervous. And it was more than I could have anticipated.”
Before any of that, she had already learned something important about what a door can do.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Bailee spent two years in public accounting. She found her current company — Hanna Oil and Gas in Fort Smith — through a young alumni and executive mentorship program at the University of Arkansas Fort Smith. She was paired with the company’s CFO. They met monthly. Eventually, it led to a job.
That experience planted something in her. Meeting monthly with a senior executive who was willing to share time and knowledge with someone just starting out — it changed her idea of what a career could look like and what she wanted to do for others someday.
Her first Quantum Leap class was the Maximize Your Potential webinar, one of KW Next Gen’s shorter online sessions. She sat in front of her screen and watched a model she hadn’t seen before: learn from your past, envision a future, take action.
It sounds simple. But Bailee says what made it land was the honesty it required.
“Sometimes we know where we want to be or what our goal may be,” she says, “but we’re not actually reflecting on what steps we’ve taken that haven’t worked, or what steps we’re not taking that we should be.”
She walked away knowing two things: she wanted to become a mentor for others someday, and before she could do that, she needed to find mentors for herself first. That realization sent her to apply for coaching.
She was paired with coach Kami Minks. “She was outstanding,” Bailee says simply. “Loved her.”
Coaching with Kami gave Bailee something she’d been missing: a roadmap.
She had big ambitions. She knew the general direction she wanted to go. But the distance between where she was and where she wanted to be felt abstract until she started using the 411 — the Quantum Leap tool that breaks a yearly goal into monthly objectives and monthly objectives into weekly ones.
“I aspired for some big things,” she says, “but I didn’t necessarily see a roadmap on how to accomplish those.”
One of the goals she set during coaching was earning her APA — the Accredited Petroleum Accountant certification. It was a meaningful credential in her field, and it had been sitting on her list. She finished her last coaching session with Kami in June of 2024. In January of 2025, she passed the APA exam.
She has also received two Fund My Mission Scholarships through KW Next Gen.
Both have gone toward her MBA in accounting — a degree she is now one class away from completing. It’s a goal she might not have pursued, she says, without the combination of coaching to clarify the direction and scholarship support to help get there.
“Thanks to the Fund My Mission Scholarships, I’ve been able to really make progress toward things that I honestly may not have even considered before,” she says. “Seeing it really now come to fruition has just been a blessing.”
The mission statement Bailee wrote through Quantum Leap is the thread that ties everything together.
To honor God by leading others to understand their worth and to think out their objectives by empowering their confidence in developing plans of action.
It isn’t a business goal. It’s not a career title. It’s a way of being — something she can live toward in every room she walks into and every relationship she builds.
This past summer, she attended QL Summit as a group leader. Hearing Gary Keller teach in person sharpened things for her even further. She came home with questions she’s still turning over.
Are you thinking in a box?
Are you making a life — or just making a living?
Am I adopting the right habits and relationships?
And one idea that has stayed with her above the others: no one ever achieves their true maximum potential alone.
“I think everyone should have a mentor,” she says. “Someone to look up to and lean on and bounce ideas off of. And with that — how can I get closer to becoming a mentor for others along the way?”
Bailee Crenshaw is 28 years old. She’s a tax accountant in Fort Smith, a wife of six years, and a mom to a three-year-old daughter. She found KW Next Gen not through real estate or Keller Williams, but through a brief mention at a leadership summit — one sentence from a speaker that she chose to follow up on.
She’s about to finish her MBA. She’s building what she calls a foundation — relationships, connections, the kind of room she wants to be in and the kind she wants to create for others.
“One thing is to dream big,” she says. “But then to have the encouragement, and to speak with people who’ve been there, done it, and now want to share what they’ve learned along the way — that’s the room I want to be in.”
She’s already helping build it for someone else.
Bailee was supported through KW Next Gen’s Quantum Leap program, Quantum Leap Coaching, and two donor-funded Fund My Mission Scholarships. To read more stories of impact, visit kwnextgen.org.
