Say Yes Before You’re Ready: Kat Cole, CEO of AG1

2013, or I think 2013. I joined as president of Cinnabon in late 2010, and I was only in the role for a little over three years, so it must have been 2012, 2013, or '12 when it filmed and '13 when it aired. It was second season, I think, because...

Yeah, 'Don't forget where you came from, but don't let it solely define you.' And then I often will add, 'Our truth is in our roots,' or 'There's some power in our history, but it should not be our anchor,' whether that means our decision anchor. So just because we did something a year ago or a week ago doesn't mean we can't do something different or undo it tomorrow or the next day. It's true for us as individuals, our personal journeys, our health journey. It's true for businesses, for brands. You know, the businesses that scale, that last generations, are those mostly that evolve over time. And yet there's a long list of businesses and brands that have so protected their past at the expense of existing in the future. And certainly that can be true for any of us as people as well. We get comfortable if we've had some win or some successes, or we think things aren't that bad. And so it applies to every aspect of my life. It's why it's my pinned post on X, and I use it maybe weekly. And I don't just go around quoting the quote, but some version of it, because it's just about change, evolution, not being held back, learning, unlearning, movement, progress. It's a quote that is my version of embodying what most would call a growth mindset.

Yeah, I think I remember hearing a quote or seeing a post from the absolutely rad Sophia Amoruso where she said something like, 'Don't compare your hustle to someone else's highlight reel,' which I love. And certainly, you know, if you think about the roles any of us might be in now, decades into our career, you would probably call that a highlight reel if we just talked about all the wins and the CEO roles and feels like a bunch of headlines and highlights. And it's so dangerous for people to compare their work, their hustle, the being in the trenches and in the weeds to those highlights. And even me today, I'm still in the weeds, in the trenches most of the time, and then there's a moment to be on a great podcast or be in an article or something like that. But there's so much grit that usually doesn't get the spotlight, and a big part of that grit for me is certainly in my background. And I'm hoping stories like mine and others are becoming much more commonplace in the media today, where people's backgrounds are very different from where they end up, because it just says you have control over your future. But you know, I've run a bunch of billion-dollar brands and businesses over decades, and yet I started out as a child of a single parent, an alcoholic father. We left my dad when I was nine. I have two younger sisters. My mom fed us on a food budget of $10 a week for three years. She worked multiple jobs. I started working very young, when I was 15, and was a mall employee at 15, which is where I fell in love with Cinnabon, where I would later run the company. I was a hostess at 17 at Hooters. I became a waitress at 18, and all of that was just like normal hardworking teenager stuff to me. Like I was working because I needed to save money, because I needed to pay for school, and I needed to pay for my living expenses, because as soon as I turned 18 I was out of the house, I was in college, first person in my family to get into college. Again, not an uncommon situation, but I didn't want to take on debt, so I didn't get student loans, and I believed I could and should work to pay my way. And so I had all these jobs, these hourly jobs. But one interesting, unexpected turn was that Hooters, the restaurant company I was with in those early years as again just a typical employee working hourly jobs to pay for college, that company was in a high growth mode globally, and that meant they were looking often for employees within the company to take on larger roles, often training and development roles, to go open new locations. Again, that in and of itself is not unusual in retail or hospitality. You take people who know the job and who want to train others and have the skills to train others, and then you send them to the new locations to train. It's how brands spread brick-and-mortar locations. But what is unusual is when you look back, I had this childhood of an alcoholic father, single parent, I become a waitress, I'm in college, I'm on a path to do something much more fancy than be a waitress, so people would think, and yet I ended up in this over 14-year career at Hooters. From 19, I started opening franchises around the world. At 20, I moved from Jacksonville to Atlanta and took a corporate job where I was the manager of employee training. So I was in a corporate role that managed the things I had been doing as an hourly employee. And as the headline is, as the company grew, I kept growing, and every 18 to 24 months I had a larger role with more responsibility. And a few years in, by the time I was 26, I was one of the presidents of that company doing $800 million in revenue and all kinds of interesting experiences there. Stayed in an executive role. Eventually we sold that business into private equity, and I was recruited to become a president for the Roark Capital private equity firm portfolio of brands that started with Cinnabon and then evolved into Focus Brands, the parent company of many other brands like Jamba Juice and Moe's and Schlotzsky's, etc. And that was my career leading up to AG1.

I mean, I think for any of us it's so hard to know, you know, what were the driving forces. All I can do from this, but because I get too much credit for being strategic, and I wasn't strategic. I was 18 years old, and I got a phone call when I was 19, and they asked me, 'Hey, do you want to go to Australia?' And I'd never been on a plane, and I didn't have a passport, and so I was like, 'Yeah,' you know. But it looks like this really thoughtful career move that led to other things. So as I've reflected, I think the most accurate way I can answer your question without seeming overly strategic at the time is that if I look at a series of those choices that others did not make similarly, or that, to your point, could have easily gone the other way. So you know, I got asked to travel around the world to be a part of a team when I had never been on a plane and didn't have a passport, and my answer was yes. Now I got to figure out how to get a passport instead of 'No, I can't go, I've never done that.' So that's an example, and that type of say yes before I'm ready, but then do the work to get ready, that example would happen over and over and over. There's a story I tell often where the, you know, the cooks walked out, or most of them quit on a shift, and only a few of us jumped back to go cook, and there were many other people on the staff on the shift, but some just stood back, some kind of maintained and helped calm the chaos, but a few of us jumped into the fire. And so when I think about like, why have I done those things, where what is that drive, there are three driving forces that come to mind that I've at least seen a pattern of, so they were likely at play in those early days. One is I was super curious. I just wanted to know, can I do it? And the curiosity was likely connected to what you said, which is anything is better than being stuck where I came from. Anything. Want me to clean toilets at another location? Great, I'm going to get experience at another location. Need me to go pick up managers from the airport? Awesome, I'm going to meet people who I'm going to learn from. So that doesn't play out well over decades, like saying yes to everything, but in the early years, the desire to just, who am I going to meet, and can I learn from them, and can that learning turn into currency to do something else, that was the curiosity. The second thing at play was helpfulness. I am a helper. I'm truly one of those people. If I see trash on the ground, I pick it up. If I see someone fall, I want to help. If I see a worker in a location who's doing hard work that often goes unnoticed, I say thank you, like all the time, everywhere, airports, bathrooms, restaurants. So that is who I am as a person. I have a deeply conscientious muscle, and so there's a helpfulness angle to a lot of the things I said yes to, because I viewed saying yes as help. Someone's asking me, they need this done. It didn't feel like opportunity for advancement, it felt like opportunities to stretch and grow and learn and help. And then the third driver was super selfish, which is most of the things I did meant more work and more hours, which meant more money to pay for my life. And so if I could work kitchen shifts and bartender shifts and waitress shifts and new store opening opportunities, then all of that meant, you know, there's only so many waitress shifts in a week, but maybe if I take up all the waitress shifts that are available, but I have more available time, there might be two kitchen shifts I could fit in or two openings. And so it was also about income for me. Work was honorable. So curiosity, helpfulness, and whatever you want to call self-sufficiency, building income.

Yeah, I mean, as long as I can remember, so maybe late teenage years, I have had not only an obsession but a healthy fear, like an obsession with knowing the true truth, and a little bit of what I would call a healthy fear of not knowing what's really going on, meaning I can handle it. Like I can take the, tell me the, tell me the ugly, tell me the bad, tell me what you don't like about me or my work or what's not, I just want to hear it. I'd rather know and do something about it. I'm one of those people that now that there are full-body MRI scans, I go as often as it is recommended because I want to know. I'm not one of the people that's like, you know, I don't want to know. But I have also learned to trust myself that I can be responsible and balanced with the many types of information I might get. I won't overreact. I don't take, you know, when you open yourself up to hearing a lot, you've also got to be able to handle it in a mature way. And so I don't know where it comes from. I don't know if it was because when my mom finally decided that we would leave my dad, I had known it was bad for a long time, and so I was like, finally, like, let's get out of here. Or the many times in my early restaurant career that I would see managers winning awards and being celebrated when actually all the people on the staff knew they were awful. And I was like, how is this POS, how is someone getting like the manager of the quarter award and they're like borderline a liability to the company? And there were many great ones, but there were these few examples, and you would come to learn like the corporate office only sees a slice. If sales are growing, that might be happening despite the manager, like lots of construction or many events, and so they get all these accolades. And so I remember sitting there as an employee seeing this all play out and going, I don't ever want to be that person. I don't want to be the manager that doesn't take great care of people, and I don't want to be the delusional, disconnected corporate person that's celebrating behavior that actually isn't the full story. I would sit with my customers, and whenever I would say, 'Hey, how is everything? Can I get you anything?' if they would go, 'It's okay,' I wouldn't walk away. I would say, 'Do you not love it?' Because I want to know, because I want to fix it. So that just mining, asking for coaching, for feedback, like assuming of course things are never going to be perfect, and of course I can always do things differently. So that is, I think, what you're referencing, this fear of not knowing the truth and this like real hunger and desire to get feedback, to act on it.

I'll share a quality and then maybe a few practices because they transcend qualities. I think for some people it can feel a little amorphous, but one quality is I just, I'm comfortable in my own skin. I love myself. I love the journey I'm on. I know I'm not perfect and never will be. I'm really proud of the many things I've done. I understand the mistakes I've made and have tried to reflect and continue to learn from those. That is a massive prerequisite for the techniques I'm going to share, because if you are worried about what are people going to think about me, are they going to think I'm too young for this role, am I going to screw this up more than someone else, you will make decisions with the wrong stakeholder in mind. And so the techniques I will share that I use when I go deep to learn any business are only the type of things someone who is not worried about their ego and how they're going to be judged, it's only the type of thing someone like that can do. So it's this muscle of ask, answer, act. So I have a series of questions that I ask people. I create an environment where people genuinely give me the honest answer, or as close to it as they are capable, and then I act on it. Not everything, but patterns, the most important things. And so ask, answer, act is the meta framework for all of my practices and techniques. So I have three questions that I ask team members when I take over a business, or customers, or investors. So what's one thing you think we should stop doing? What's one thing you think we should start doing? What's one thing you would do differently if you were me? And people tell you their thoughts. Yeah. And when you're new, this is when it should be the easiest to ask these questions, because you weren't there before, you didn't do it, so you should be like digging for these things. It's much harder to ask these questions once you've been somewhere for a while, because by definition of you having been there, the things they're going to say you should do differently are probably undoing or addressing the things you did. And so going deep when you're new is one act that to me should be a no-brainer. Going back and going deep regularly and being willing to look in the mirror of people's reactions to what you might have caused. I mean, some people say it takes such courage and guts, but to me it doesn't. Like the risk of not knowing is so much greater. The risk of just feeling like everything I did two years ago was brilliant and is still working miraculously in a world that never sits still. So I ask those questions, I get the answers, I act on them. I then do check-ins with team members and ask six questions. What's been the best part of the last 30 days? The worst part of the last 30 days? Tell me one thing I can do differently to be a better partner for you, which by definition is something I am not doing or something I need to do more of. What's worried you or weighed on you most in the last 30 days? What are you most grateful for? What are you most proud of? I do this check-in with my husband. My husband and I do this check-in every month. We have since we met. We have not missed a month, maybe with an exception of when we had our two kids, but even then we probably made it up within a number of days. And that's been almost nine years of not missing a month of check-in. So this idea of just staying close, asking and answering questions, but most importantly acting on it. These are action exercises. They're not meditations. They're not reflection exercises. I love those, but that's not what this is. And so those things help me go deep, but I can do them because I am willing, and people can feel that I'm willing to hear whatever is their perspective, and then I'm disciplined enough to focus on the patterns and the few things that emerge as the most consistent, highest-order opportunities for the most important stakeholders.

Or definitely, but safety not in the how it has morphed a bit. Like everyone has to be safe to say anything and do anything. It's more like I really want to know the truth, and you have an obligation to tell the truth. You have an obligation, like it would be failing me if you didn't tell me the truth. I would be failing you if I didn't tell you the truth. So it is psychological safety, but it is psychological safety that comes from a shared sense of responsibility that we're actually failing ourselves and each other if we don't speak up. So there's this, I don't know, there's like a squishy version of safety that's like we're all mice and can everybody make it really quiet so we can speak up? And then there's a shared responsibility of safety that we all have a responsibility to not only communicate something we need to, but to listen deeply when someone has something to say.

With my husband, it's monthly. With my team, it's several times a year, because that's going pretty deep and reflecting. But then we'll summarize it, and maybe a few times, we're a fully remote company, so a few times a year out of the every other month that we get together as a leadership team, we'll kind of bundle them and say, tell me, you know, one thing that's weighing on you and worrying you, and one thing you're proud or grateful for. And so we still use a form of that to check in very often.

Yeah, it's slightly evolved over time, and I would word it as, because some people hear the like, oh, you don't care what people think, great, and that can actually be taken to an extreme. It's not that I don't care. I actually do care what people think. I just, I am very clear on the weighting of the who. So there are some people who, if I weight their opinion relative to the impact of my business, it's zero or one percent or two percent. And then there are a handful of people where what they think is heavily weighted, you know, because they're a deeply involved stakeholder. And so I find people struggle with this in two ways, like knowing how to value different people's opinion of you and your decisions, and where to allow that to color your thinking. So there's external stakeholders. So, you know, there's a layer of people that we think we care what they think, but we actually don't know them, and they probably don't know us. And yet there's this feeling of I want them, this mysterious them, to respect me, to think I'm smart, to think my decisions... And of course we all want people to value what we do, but that layer has almost nothing to do with my day-to-day decisions, unless that layer influences the people who my decisions do affect. And that in some cases that is true. And so I've got to be aware and understand. So I ask myself about whose opinion do I care, to what degree, and then what am I going to do about that? If I deeply care, then I'll talk to them, I'll engage them, I'll communicate what I'm thinking, my process, and engage them in the decision-making, and then be clear where they, if they have a voice or vote. And often I've been in situations where I need to communicate to people, you have a voice but not a vote, so we just, we're all clear. And then there are times where I need a group to contribute to the decision, and they have a voice and a vote. And so when I moved to AG1, there were several people who I deeply respect in business who were like, that is so much of a smaller company than what you've run. Why are you doing that? You should, you're crazy. This is not a smart move. You should be going to name the Fortune 500 company. And yes, that would have been obvious and plausible to a degree, but there were a million reasons. It felt like to me it was really three, four, or five key reasons that made moving to AG1 such an obvious smart move. I was a customer. I believed in the business. I could really see where it was going. It was a leader. It was growing faster than I thought. It was even larger than I thought. It had so much potential that the business and the team needed what I had, and yet I had things to learn from this unique opportunity, and it was a rocket ship. And so I had to decide about whose opinion do I care? Are those people going to be there to save me if I listen to them and go take some big role at a big company, and I decide it's not for me? No, of course not. Exactly. So it's those exercises over time that when you build the muscle of conscious consideration of these things, it turns into subconscious, just how you think, and then you're a bit more grounded in who matters and who doesn't on a day-to-day basis versus having to go through a really deeply considered thought exercise to figure it out.

I knew I wanted to take a bit of time just to pause from operating other people's businesses. I had been doing that since I was 17 years old. I was supposed to leave Focus after nine years in 2020, but then COVID hit, and that was a terrible time to leave. Like, I needed to double down and show up as a leader, especially that industry, which got decimated, my gosh. And so I delayed my departure for a year and got everything set up, and then felt great. Like, my job is done. My job here is done. There's not another role I want in this company that I haven't done. It's time for the next generation of leadership, and time for me to go into whatever is the next chapter. So I wasn't going to anything specific. I was just ending a very, like, a 10-year amazing chapter at Focus Brands, the last four of which I had been the president and COO of the entire company, managing nine brands, billions in sales, and navigated the insanity that was 2020 on all levels. And so my plan was take a year off or close to a year. And I had been an angel investor for a decade. I just never talked about it. Nobody knew I put my personal capital, my personal time into businesses that were the future of industry, so CPG, tech, better-for-you sodas and snacks, and many other things. And so I just didn't talk about it. So for some people who were like, wow, you joined a founder-led growth-stage business, it's actually not that shocking if you know I had invested in over 60 early-stage founder-led businesses. Then I was on the board of two founder-led growth-stage venture-backed businesses for years. So I was actually already in this ecosystem. I just didn't talk about it publicly. I wasn't posting about it. It wasn't on my LinkedIn in any meaningful way because I was running these huge brands. And so it looks disjointed or unobvious leaping from Focus Brands to what was then called Athletic Greens, now AG1, but it actually was happening, like many things do, in little stepstones that led up to it for years. So I've been working with founders for almost a decade. I was in the venture-backed ecosystem for over five years, whether board roles, mentoring, or advisory roles. I've been an AG1 customer myself for two years before I'd ever met anyone from the business. So I was a fan girl, but my plan was take this year, continue this investing activity that's been going on for a long time, maybe ramp it up a little bit, do a little more speaking, work on a book for some of my growth principles and practices, and just chill. But I didn't chill. It took about...