Lori Flees was named chief executive officer and director of Valvoline Inc., effective October 1, 2023.

Flees joined Valvoline Inc. as president of the fast-growing retail services business in North America which operates more than 1,800 Company-owned and franchised service center locations (No. 2 in the U.S. under the Valvoline Instant Oil Change brand and No. 3 in Canada under the Valvoline Great Canadian Oil Change brand by number of stores) serving consumer and fleet customers, and nearly 300 Express Care locations.

Before joining Valvoline, she spent nearly a decade at Walmart where she, most recently, oversaw all aspects of Walmart’s health and wellness business across more than 4,800 locations, including the COVID vaccination operations. She started at Walmart as the head of corporate strategy which also included responsibility for global mergers and acquisitions. She was promoted to senior vice president of next generation retail and principal, store no 8., where she led the incubation of new retail capabilities via the deployment of emerging technologies and strategic partnerships including Google and Microsoft. She then moved to running part of the retail operations as senior vice president and general merchandise manager for Sam’s Club Health & Wellness, the 590-site wholesale club’s pharmacy and optical business.

Prior to her leadership experience at Walmart, she spent 17 years at Bain & Company Inc., where she performed a variety of work in consumer goods and services, engineering and construction, industrial manufacturing and oil and gas. Flees has extensive experience in M&A, corporate strategy, and performance improvement, including experience developing growth strategies for retailers with a combination of company-owned and franchised stores. Early in her career, she worked at Intel and at General Motors.

A native of Michigan, Flees holds a bachelor’s degree in management systems from Kettering University and a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School.

Travis Dobbins has served as senior vice president, chief technology officer for Valvoline Inc. since February 2023. In his role, he provides strategic and operational leadership for Valvoline Inc.’s IT team, which is responsible for desktop and cloud services, network, information security, retail store point-of-sale, customer experience platforms, as well as corporate applications that support finance, supply chain, HR and sales and analytics.

Dobbins joined Valvoline in 2010 where he led the technology team responsible for all Valvoline Instant Oil ChangeSM (VIOC) service centers nationwide. From there he held director and vice president roles responsible for all Valvoline retail technology platforms, business intelligence and analytics, digital products and overall end-to-end design and delivery of business platforms.

Before Valvoline Inc., he served for six years as a leader within the Ashland, Inc. technology group where he managed global business process solutions and ERP platforms.

Prior to his leadership roles at Valvoline and Ashland, he spent six years as a technology consultant at Plaut/IDS Scheer for companies including Paramount Studios and Raytheon.

Dobbins holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology from University of Louisville.

Julie O’Daniel has served as chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Valvoline Inc. since September 2016 and senior vice president since January 2017. She is responsible for managing Valvoline Inc.’s legal and corporate governance matters and oversees Valvoline’s security team and environmental, health and safety group.

She served as lead commercial council for Valvoline and been part of the Valvoline leadership team since October 2012. She joined Ashland, Valvoline’s former parent company, in 2007 as senior counsel, managing complex litigation matters across Ashland’s business units.

Previously, O’Daniel was a partner at the law firm of Alston & Bird LLP in Atlanta, where she advised in the areas of securities litigation, mergers and acquisitions-related litigation, governmental investigations and other corporate matters.

O’Daniel holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Eastern Kentucky University and earned her J.D. from the University of Kentucky.