Jill Grammer: naming names and loving it.

• Author: Creager, Janine S.
• Position: Woman-owned Businesses

WHAT'S REALLY IN A NAME? QUITE A bit, according to Jill Grammer. And as owner and president of American Name Services (ANS), she really ought to know.

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ANS is a nationally accredited, full-service list brokerage and list management company, specializing in postal and e-mail lists as well as international mailers. The company, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, was named one of Utah Business magazine's Top 25 Woman-owned Businesses and was also listed as one of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Businesses last year by Mountain West Capital Network.

Simply put, Jill Grammer has made quite a name for herself.

But all this was not some haphazard accomplishment. Jill Grammer knew at a young age where she wanted to go in her life. As part of a school assignment in the sixth grade, she wrote out her obituary, which turned out to be extremely prophetic. "I wrote that I was going to have a business," remembers Grammer, "and that my family would work for me." Two sisters work at ANS, and her mother worked as company controller until her passing in 2004. Her husband Jerry Williams also joined the company at the first of this year and has helped bring ANS to an even higher level of service.

Although Grammer had some career ideas entering college, finding her present path took a few twists and turns. "I was destined to be a lawyer until I took a statistics class at the University of Utah," she says. "That's when a weird statistics bug bit me." With that one bite, she went from a pre-law major to a degree in economics.

She moved to Los Angeles where she worked first as an actuary for an insurance company, then hired on with a list company. While she loved the work, she longed to return to Utah to be back with her family. The fact that there were no list companies in Utah at the time did not deter her in the least. She just did what all great entrepreneurs do: she started her own company.

"Ten years ago, I just wanted to have a little business. Little by little I found this niche, and we have specialized in...