All right, and today's special guest, one of the greatest female leaders in the world, the great Kat Cole.
Thank you for having me. So excited. So great to be here.
And I'm so excited to talk to you. I've been knowing about your leadership journey for so long and just dying to hear the story from you.
Can't wait to get into it. Well, you know, I've been following you for a long time and I'm a huge, huge fan.
Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.
Sometimes I'm surprised that anyone even knows who I am.
Gobi, you're a 50-year-old in the desert running and running and running, and separate of the winning, which is incredible, but just your story for me came out of nowhere. And the message that you've put out into the world since then, since I followed on hard and hard work and resilience, and how you share your family as a part of that, just like speaks to my soul.
Oh, thank you. I tried to share things about the family with some sensitivity, you know, with teenage kids. I always have to check with them, make sure everything's good to go. Especially now, my middle son who's running, I take a picture and he's like, 'Let me see that picture before you share it.' I'm like, 'All right.' So I try to be very respectful of their privacy, but sometimes they like it. They all have social media, so they're like, I mean, they don't all have their own social media, but they're aware of social media.
And their friends all see it, so they'll tell them like, 'Oh, I saw you on your dad's social media.' Which...
Exactly. Where did you grow up?
It was complicated. You know, I meet people and they think of Jacksonville as this beautiful beach place, the East Coast of Florida, and it is. But my relationship with it is pretty tense. So in Jacksonville where I grew up, my dad's side of the family in particular were kind of the stereotypical darker parts of the South, and maybe not just the South of life and alcoholism, drugs. Most of my family, if anyone did have a job, they were good honest blue-collar jobs, junkers, truckers, factory workers, but many did not, and let's just say we're not productive members of society. And my mom was the youngest of seven kids, grew up in Jacksonville multiple generations. Her dad died when she was three, and so we were in this really interesting situation in Jacksonville where it was a simple life in a lot of ways, but I had a bit of a tale of two cities in my own home. My mom, who was loving and curious and inspirational, a secretary at the time when she was having kids, and what was called a secretary back then, and my father, who's a Vietnam vet, was the only person on both sides of my family to have a fancy job. He had a white-collar job. He was an executive at an auto imports company. Jacksonville is a big auto imports town, a lot of ports, and so I grew up with a father who had more money than anyone else in the family, even though we were just upper middle class, a mom who had grown up with a really tough life, and an extended family in Jacksonville who lived more like everybody else in Jacksonville did, trailers, you know, trailer parks, or if they had homes, very humble beginnings.
And when I was nine years old, my mom came to me and said, 'That's it, I'm done, we're leaving.' And what she meant was we were leaving my father. My father was and is a very sweet man, but at the time, terrible husband and father, had been an alcoholic for many, many years. And my mom for years thought to herself, 'I should be grateful, because everybody in Jacksonville, everybody in my family has to deal with the alcoholism and the drugs and the cheating and the not coming home and the DUIs, but none of them have a house. So I should be grateful because my friends, extended family, they all have this situation but they don't have the financial security that we do.' So for many years she stayed, until one day nothing worse happened, just the same. And another weekend he didn't come home, and she just said, 'That's it.' So she came to me and said, 'I'm leaving.' And at the age of nine I looked at her and said, 'What took you so long?'
And when she and I talk about this, it was this moment that I realized what a tough decision that was for her, but she realized I'd been waiting for her to make that decision.
It's interesting when you think about it. On one hand, she had this reinforcing belief that she was lucky. She was so lucky that she believed she had no right to try to make it different or better. And then she just flipped to the other side of that line, which is just because I'm fortunate, just because it could be worse, doesn't mean I don't have the right, and in this case the responsibility, to make it better for my three girls. I was nine, my sisters were six and three or four.
And so we left that weekend.
A friend's house. My mom then got a small house for us. She put us on a food budget of $10 a week for three years, worked multiple jobs, which is how I started working really early. And in that window, I remember a few things. One, I don't remember my mom ever speaking ill of my father, which is just interesting. She had every right to. If she did, I have no recollection. That I do believe shaped me in a way. You can deal with stuff, you can navigate difficulty, and you don't have to spend your energy on the people who are the cause of it, much less trash other people, especially to their kids.
The second thing I remember is how positive she was about people who had means and money, even though we didn't. And I remember driving through, we had this tradition, I don't know if you ever did this when you were younger, where we would drive through the neighborhoods in the holidays and see the holiday lights. It'd be like, you know, Christmas lights, and like, 'Oh, it's so beautiful.' And I remember my mom admiring nice homes with nice decorations. And I remember her in the car saying, 'Look at that, they must have worked so hard, they must have worked so hard on that.' Not 'I wish we had that,' or 'I can't believe your dad,' but just admiration and assuming there was hard work behind that. And that shaped me. Like she's admiring nice things, but she's tying it to hard work. And so I remember that about her.
And then I remember her being insanely resourceful and scrappy, like bringing home scraps of meat from the butcher and stretching the big frozen meals and potted meat sandwiches and beanie weenies. And if anyone doesn't know what that is, you should look it up. It is not the pinnacle of healthy food that we all eat today. And so out of that situation with my dad and his side of the family, with a lot of alcoholism and drug abuse and darker things as the years would go on, there was this incredible shining light in my mom, who was independent and resourceful and brave and just got stuff done. So the positive side of my memories of Jacksonville are my mom and whatever shaped her to become what she was. But I have some not-so-fun memories as well.
Yeah. We, when during the holidays, we drive, my wife, whether I'm there or not. Sometimes if I'm traveling, she'll take the kids, because sometimes I'm like, 'I don't want to sit in the car for half an hour driving around looking at Christmas lights.' But she'll take the kids and a bottle of wine, and they drive around and they ring the bell of the best house with the best lights, and she gives them a bottle of wine and says, 'You won a Christmas light contest.' And the kids love it, even now as teenagers.
All right, so what was your first job?
My first job was working in a mall when I was 15, selling women's clothes at a women's clothing store called The Body Shop, and they were famous for a brand of jeans called Bongo jeans.
Maybe it'll come back at some point.
Yeah, they were like super bright colors, coral, teal, bright yellow, and the jeans and the jean shorts would match the jean vest with matching scrunchie socks and matching hair scrunchies, and I was a salesperson. And I loved working in sales, but I also got 50% off clothes for my sisters and I.
So it was a very functional and practical job as someone who needed to make her own money and help the family, but it was also a ton of fun. I set sales awards when I was 15 and 16 years old, but that's not the first job that most people know me for. There was then a second job, which was becoming a hostess at Hooters, and that was the beginning of an almost 15-year career with Hooters restaurant. So technically my second job, but my first job in that stretch.
Yeah, I would have thought you were going to say like a supermarket. That was my first job was, I know I had a paper route, then I was at the supermarket. Slowly moving up in the pecking order.
That's right. That's right.
And what drew you to Hooters as a young girl? And was your mom like, 'You're not working at Hooters'? What was her feeling?
No, you know what's interesting. So Hooters, for anyone who doesn't know, at the time an iconic kind of chicken wing restaurant focused on sports. You could go there and watch any football game, any basketball game, beer and wings. Didn't even have hard alcohol at the time. It was beer for like 20 years. But what was iconic and different about it was the uniform of the waitresses. One, it was an all-female wait staff, so that was unique. And it's these orange shorts, so think like a little more kind of like the '80s running jogging shorts. It was founded in 1983, and that is what the uniform was created from, was like modern running attire. So these orange kind of silky-looking satin running shorts and a white tank top with an owl on it, the 'hoo' in Hooters. Yeah, funny.
So, but it started in Florida. And when I grew up, there were several Hooters restaurants through Florida. We would go there on weekends. You'd go there to watch a football game with family, or if you were in sports on the weekends, the teams would go there after. So if you're a Floridian at the time, it kind of wasn't a big deal. Hooters was everywhere, it was cool. You could drive up on your boat at the Jacksonville Landing or the San Jose location on the St. Johns River from fishing or being out. It was just kind of a Florida thing. So my mom was just happy I had good-paying jobs to pay my, save up, I was still in high school at the time being 17, and save up for college. I was the first person in my family to get into college, so it was just a restaurant. I was so unaware of how it was viewed when people would come from outside the state and they're like, 'Oh, there's these girls in tiny shorts serving chicken wings.' And there was a socially acceptable sex appeal part of the concept, but when you're in it, it just felt like a cool restaurant to work in.
No, definitely from the outside looking in, I think of Hooters as girls with big boobs or hooters. I did not have that when I was... like little tank tops and short shorts. All the girls were good-looking and kind of voluptuous. That was at least the reputation. And then I would just think it would be just a bunch of drunk guys in there drinking beer and eating chicken wings and talking to the girls.
It was. So I was there for almost 15 years, 14 and a half, but only the first two were spent in the restaurants, in the stores, because I moved into the corporate office by the time I was 20 years old. But in those few years there were so many interesting experiences. One, there were so many girls like me who moved into management. 80% or so of the hourly workforce was female. So you think about that, it's mostly women working in there. And so the women, we ran the place. We are the server, the product, the brand, the icon. And if you're a brand that understands that, you work really hard to take care of that staff.
And in a way, we looked at it, we were trained to look at it as almost Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. You are here to have a look and an image, but you're also here to do a job, to serve, to take care of your staff. And so we had a few rules, like one, when women do come in, you look at women first. When children come in, you take care of children first. The concept, because it was in Florida, was so much more family. Yeah, it was dudes drinking beer watching sports, but it was also a lot of baseball teams and cheerleading squads and families that would come. But that wasn't what was marketed about it. So one, as a woman, I and we felt very empowered there. And if you think about it, because there is a side of that concept that's socially acceptable female sex appeal, and you know that there is a male-leaning customer base, we also had more training, more support, managers who understood and were looking out for things. You know, where you did hear about things happening in restaurants that weren't really positive.
Yeah. Fridays, Applebee's, major chef-driven Michelin-starred restaurants.
Yes. So it's kind of ironic that the place that was known for having women in little uniforms was the place with more training, less tolerance for BS, and a bunch of empowered women. Whereas in other restaurants and other environments, there wasn't the training, there wasn't the awareness, and so stuff happened in many places for a very long time without it being addressed. That stuff would not fly. You'd have to deal with things, of course, like you would in any restaurant, but you were more trained, you were more supported, and there was not tolerance. And that felt very safe and empowering. And it's why so many women wanted to work there, and then why so many of us stayed and moved into management. And then you have women who've been the waitresses now running the restaurants, and then women who used to run the restaurants being vice presidents. When that happened, you have generations of people with experiences who also look to continually make it even better for the staff.
For 10 years, I was addicted to opiates, and most people in my life had no idea. I had a big job in finance. I was training and racing Ironman races. From the outside, I looked like I was doing great. I was really good at doing hard things. I just wasn't doing the one hard thing I actually needed to do: get sober. Eventually, I learned that if I was going to create the life I really wanted, I'd have to face the things I'm avoiding. And there's always something: a conversation you don't want to have, something you know you need to stop, something you need to start, a truth you already know but don't really want to look at. That idea comes up again and again in the conversations I have on my podcast. I've spoken with Olympic gold medalists, world-class athletes, founders, and CEOs, as well as military operators, people who've battled addiction, lost everything, and rebuilt their lives. Different lives, different problems, but everyone has something they have to face. That's why I created the newsletter 'Nowhere to Hide'. Every Monday, I'll send you one real story from my life or from someone I've interviewed, and one thing you can actually do that week to make a difference. If you sign up now, we're going to start with three hard days: three days, three principles that have changed my life, three challenges that you can actually put into practice. Because the goal isn't to read another newsletter and think about changing your life, it's to actually do something. So if there's something you've been avoiding, start here. Go to kenrideout.com/newsletter to get day one.
What was the transition like going from hostess, waitress, or server to now management? What were the challenges, and what did you like? What did you not like? What were you good at?
Yeah, there were many, some that I couldn't have anticipated. One thing that was super cool is I was 20 years old working in a corporate office. I thought I was hot...
You know, and like it felt very far from where I came from. I was proud. I was wearing a polo. I was in an office. I had a cubicle. That felt like miles away from my past.
And I was really proud, really proud. Like anyone might have looked at me from the outside and been like, 'Oh, she works for Hooters?' I would hear none of that. And so I was, I think, more proud than I would have expected. And I took a lot of pride in my job and in my work. And I wanted to make that brand and that restaurant even better and even more iconic than it was. So that was surprising, how much pride and responsibility I felt, because I was still pretty young. There were many people working in those restaurants who were my age or younger or older, and I felt an obligation to make it great for them. So I felt more responsibility than I would have expected, and more pride.
I was also super grateful. I don't know many companies that would have plucked a 20-year-old out of their restaurants and said, 'Come work in our corporate office and help run training, management, franchising, and new store openings.' So I was deeply grateful to the company, but to my two bosses in particular at the time, Kimmy and Cheryl, two vice presidents of HR and training. They saw me teaching workshops in the restaurants and invited me to interview for professional advancement in the company. So I was just so grateful.
There was one huge challenge that I did not anticipate, and it didn't come out until a little later. But the first challenge that I did anticipate was just working in an office and not in the restaurants. And I'm walking around this office with people who had not worked in the restaurants. So building relationships not by watching sports and slinging wings and taking orders and cracking crab legs, sitting down and having coffee with people.
It's just a different way to build rapport. And so that took me time. I wasn't natural at that and had some really great mentors from the office. But the thing that would catch up with me, maybe about a year later, I get called into the vice president's office, and she sat me down with one of the directors, and she looked at me and like closed the door. So imagine these two women sitting there, and she closed the door, and she said, 'We're worried about you. We think we know what's going on, and we want you to get help.' And I was sitting there, and I just started bawling, crying. And what she meant was she had suspected, rightly, that I had an eating disorder. And for a very brief period of time, I'm so lucky that it was brief, I was bulimic. And I would eat and make myself throw up. I was 21 years old.
And she said, 'Look, you travel around the world. You represent our company. And if I have to worry about your health and well-being, I cannot send you around the world.' And she knew me. One, think about how baller this is to have a leader who cares enough to recognize something might be going on, to be thoughtful enough to use what she knew would motivate me. She knew I loved traveling around the world doing those openings. And while she didn't threaten, she made it very clear that if I didn't take care of myself, I couldn't represent the company on the road. And I didn't say anything to acknowledge what was going on, but I said, 'I will get help.' So the company connected me with a nutritionist and a psychologist who had me answer this like, I don't remember how many questions it was, it was like a 100-question survey.
And she came back with a report. And the report was two parts. One part was nutritional and medical, to walk me through what would happen to my body, my hair, my skin, my teeth, my energy, my reproductive capability if I continued down this path. It was the first time that I ever had deep nutritional education, was in this moment. And that scared me to death. They showed me pictures of what happens to people who go down this path and can't get out.
And the second part was a readout of my psychological analysis and behavioral analysis. And she said, 'While we never know what's truly underneath when people experience this and navigate this, what it appears is you so quickly transitioned from an environment, the restaurants, where you were literally the operation. You're making things happen. If you need food, you get food. If the customer doesn't have what they need, you take care of them. You were the trainer and the leader and the boss and everything. I was the center of those restaurants. And you immediately come here as a 20-year-old where you are behind the scenes working on training materials. You have no idea where they go, right? You're so many layers disconnected from the impact and the action that it appears you are seeking control. And this is what you can control.' I was also running 10Ks every weekend, working out two times a day. And it was tough for me because I looked so fit and healthy. I was being reinforced. People were like, 'You look so great. You're so fit. You're running these 10Ks. It's amazing.' Meanwhile, I had added this little layer to my routine. Fortunately, it had only been a few months.
And this intervention, which it absolutely was, both scared me straight because I didn't want my health to go downhill. I was actually trying to control my health, my appearance, my everything. And it looked like it was going to remove my professional ability, which I loved so much. And there was something about the way that woman, that therapist, explained it that it just made sense. Like, I don't know if you're right, but it sounds right. I went from this active, in-the-middle-of-the-action environment to like talking to very few people in an office working on materials. And it was the understanding of what it was, and that that was a very rapid transition. To the point of your question, pretty rapid transition to an extremely different environment with a lot of responsibility. But I'd moved to Atlanta for this job. I had almost no friends. I mean, I was a workaholic. But I loved it. The work was my job. Work was my life. So this was this little pocket of how I could control some piece of my life. And having that intervention, it was like a light switch. Never again.
And I felt so proud that I didn't realize until I learned more that that can lead to the end of people's lives. Like people, it's something they battle their whole lives in many cases.
And I didn't, because of Kimmy, because of Colleen, the two women who sat me down. They even brought in one of my old bosses from Jacksonville, who they knew I loved, and had him sit down with me. And talk about people who cared. Demonstrating leadership, but keeping it about the business. You know, they didn't get into my personal life. They just said, 'We know this is going on. It could affect the business. We care about you. We want you to get help. We're facilitating help.' And I did. And it never happened again. And I was 21 years old.
It's also amazing that they gave you a chance to fix it and didn't hold it all against you for the foreseeable future, that you were still able to advance in that career.
I mean, it was like it had never happened. And they checked on me from time to time. You know, they'd ask, 'How are you doing?' with that deeper look in the eye. Like, 'How's it going? You doing okay?' And I'm like, 'I am. Thank you.' And it was on me to demonstrate they could trust me. I would hold up my end of the bargain. I'm not going to misrepresent the company, and taking care of myself is a part of being a good professional. There's something about that little seed that eventually would grow into my absolute obsession with nutrition.
That didn't start right then, but that feeling of nutrition as a foundation for your responsibilities, nutrition as a foundation to do what you want to do, so I can show up for the people and pursuits I love, not just because of health. And over the years that followed, those women would move on to other careers. I became vice president in the company, stayed, helped grow the company around the world, very healthily personally, and eventually left after 14 years. The CEO of the company died suddenly, his son took over, we had to sell the company into private equity, and I was very central in that process, and then was recruited by private equity firms to go run other restaurant chains.
It's amazing that the psychologist pointed that out to you about control, because I talk about that with addiction all the time. At least as it pertains to my own addiction, is one of the things that I get tripped up with a lot. It's like wanting to control my emotions all the time. So if I'm feeling anxious, nervous, insecure, for years I could take opiates and be like, 'Okay, I'm out of that feeling. I'm into a new feeling.' But when you artificially spike your dopamine and serotonin and all these like feel-good chemicals, they become dull to everything that really matters in life, like walking on the beach in the Caribbean. It's like everything was flat to me unless I was taking drugs.
And it took a long time to figure that out. But like what you were just describing, it started as a seed and grew over time. Like even at 55, I still think like I'm constantly learning things about myself and having realizations of like, 'Oh my god, I can't believe it took me so long to figure this out.' And it can be frustrating at times, but the people I really feel bad for is the people that don't realize that, like you, you can constantly evolve. They get into a routine and it's just, I don't know, there's no more drive to like learn or experience new things. They just get stuck. And like you were saying, like traveling around the world, and we'll get into some of your work in Africa. Like I love exotic travel. I love seeing places that people haven't seen before. It's one of the downsides with the internet. Before when I first moved to London, before the internet got really big, everything was so exotic. Like the thought of going to Bangkok. All I knew of Bangkok was like Indiana Jones. I'm like, I'm going to Bangkok. Like now you're like, oh, in Bangkok, let me pull it up, you can see a freaking 10 live cams. You know what I mean?
And you go, it doesn't look like it looked like on the Instagram.
Exactly. But all right, so when Hooters was sold, where did you go from there? Private equity, you became like a...
Private equity, and became the CEO, the president of Cinnabon. So not yet on my health journey, October.
I was going to say, when I was saying that, I was talking to my wife about this, I was like, that would be the worst job in the world for me because I love stuff like that. To me it's like drugs. I got to be very careful because like I could have a bite and then be like, F this, I'm eating a whole tray of Cinnabons. And cinnamon buns couldn't be like my favorite treat in the world. I couldn't imagine working there, and they're so good, but they're so bad for you.
So good. So it was again such a cool time. One, when I grew up working in malls selling clothes when I was 15, there were two concepts that we loved going to, and it was Auntie Anne's and Cinnabon. Loved those smells. As high school kids, we would like treat ourselves. So I had a real soft spot in my heart for the nostalgia of the brand.
I get a call from this private equity firm who I'd been talking to about working in their firm, but the timing didn't work out. They called me and said, 'Hey, we're going to need a president of Cinnabon. This brand's got to get turned around. It's taking a real beating out of the Great Recession.' It was based only in malls and airports, and in times of depressed discretionary income, there are two things people stop doing: shopping and traveling. So malls and airports had double-digit declines in revenue driven by double-digit declines in foot traffic, and so the brand was beloved, but the business was in trouble. And so they called and said, 'We think you should interview.' And I thought, 'I'm not going to get the... I've worked at Hooters my whole life, and I know I can go run restaurants, but to become the president of such a large, global, iconic brand, they probably want some people who've been presidents of big businesses before.'
And how big were they, just for context?
300 million. How many stores?
About 400 stores and a fledgling licensing business.
And so I then went in and became the president of Cinnabon. They hired me. And I remember I was still at Hooters at the time, and I went to the CEO, who was the son of the CEO who'd passed away while we were transitioning it into private equity. And I said, 'Hey, I'm only going to tell you, but I have an opportunity to interview to go run a different restaurant chain, and I'm definitely not going to get the role. But I don't want you to hear about me interviewing from somebody else.' And that was a risk, right? He could have been like, 'You're out of here.'
Yeah, would have been stupid, but yeah.
And he said, 'Thank you for telling me. The only thing I ask is you don't leave me in a lurch.' Meaning you don't just haul out of here right away if you get it. I'm like, 'Don't worry, I'm never going to get offered the role.' So I did get offered the opportunity, and so I went to him and said, 'Look, they've offered me the role, but I promised I wouldn't leave you.' And he said, 'I need you to stay until we sell the company.' Which there was no guarantee of how long that would take. It took six more months. They held the job for me.
Six months for a business that's struggling? I can't believe they waited that long.
They had another leader who could help out between the brands. At the time, Focus Brands had Schlotzsky's, Moe's, Carvel Ice Cream, and Cinnabon. And one of the presidents of Carvel was like, 'I can help.' And they had this philosophy that I loved, which is wait for great. If you have the person, it's better to wait for great than compromise and just get somebody in. And so that was another big lesson for me, seeing how one of what is now one of the largest and top private equity firms in all of restaurants globally, how they behave around leadership, how much they value the right leader that they would wait. Roark Capital.
And so they held the role for me while I transitioned at Hooters, and we got an offer for the company, and that was on a Friday, and I started at Cinnabon on a Monday. And the business had so many challenges being in malls and airports that it was quite a job to come in and turn the business around, but we did in just a few years turn it around to being positive.
And there were three things that we did. One was make sure we had the right team in place. The team and the franchisees, they were tired. You know, there'd been a lot of years of tough times, and I don't know if anyone who watches this or listens, if you've ever been on a team or in a group or in a company that goes through a losing streak where things are more red than they are green, they're harder than they are fun. That takes its toll on people. And so my first job was to come in and make sure I believed, to inject belief, and that the team who was out in the field believed, that they weren't so tired that they were negative. And we needed to be realistic, but we shouldn't be sitting around saying, 'Oh, woe is me.' It was our job to make the most of this incredible brand. Even though the economy was difficult, it was difficult for almost everybody. And so it was at least an even playing field the way I looked at it. And so job one was inject belief. Bring it from me and the team, and the belief was genuine for me. I wasn't tired. I hadn't been there for years. I had nothing but loving memories of this brand. And so building the team, making sure they were on side and ready to go be a...
Support to the franchisees like it was day one was job one. The second was I did nothing but work in the restaurants, and we called them bakeries, for 60 days. Rolling cinnamon rolls, taking out the trash, and I asked everybody three questions, the same three questions: Tell me one thing we should stop doing to make the business better. Tell me one thing we should start doing to make the business better. And then tell me one thing you would do differently if you were me to make things better.
And that third question, the first one's obvious. Like so many companies, we analyze ourselves to death. We just add systems, add product, add routine. We very rarely prune. And when times are tight, you need to find your own pennies, your own dimes, and the best way to do that is to cut down to only what is essential. And so the way I did that without just coming in as a leader and saying I'm just going to cut this initiative or cut these products is ask people: What is the one thing we should stop doing? What's something we're doing that doesn't add value? What's something we give to customers they throw away and don't care about? Like tell me all the things you think we could cut without hurting the business, but asking people one at a time.
Then the second question is about, well, what do I invest the savings from that first question? What do I invest it in? What's the one thing we should start doing? And the third question had two jobs. One is to show people respect. I'm asking them to envision themselves as president of the company, which shows that I believe that's a question worth asking to them. Imagine you're me. What would you do differently? It also creates some empathy because for a minute people are like, 'Oh man, that is a tough, that is a tough job.' And I got answers to these questions from tons of people in a short period of time.
And the pattern that came from their answers led to one very clear insight because the answers were things like we need a cheaper product. It's the recession. Cinnamon rolls are big and getting expensive for a pastry. Then we heard people say, 'Oh, people are looking for smaller portions.' This was the height of the Atkins craze and the Atkins diet, and here we are like the poster child for carbs and sugar. A cinnamon roll the size of your face.
And then when I asked the managers and franchisees, 'What should we do differently?' They're like, 'We need to be more profitable. People need something more portable.' I'm like, 'Okay. People are asking for cheaper, smaller, more portable, more profitable. We should probably launch smaller portions.' And so one of the key initiatives was launching and expanding a smaller cinnamon roll, the Minibon. It wasn't mini, it was just less than huge. And that became one of the key drivers of the brand's turnaround.
The third thing was to realize that even if we turned the mall locations around, malls were only growing so much. People were only visiting malls like 1.4 times a year. And it had taken us over two decades to get just a few hundred locations. We needed a different growth strategy. And so the third thing was a longer-term body of work, which was licensing. Taking our brand, our IP, and our ingredients and partnering with big CPG companies to get restaurant-branded products, Cinnabon-branded product in grocery stores, and in different restaurant chains.
Those things together turned around the business in less than 18 months and led it to being a billion dollars in global revenue. So we over tripled the revenue of the company in just a few years, profitably.
Damn, they must have loved you. I hope you tied your compensation all the way to performance. [laughter]
I should have. I did not have you as a coach back then.
I needed to be your agent.
You know what was interesting then is they did love me. But there were moments where they didn't. Every leader makes mistakes. And I remember a time at Cinnabon where it was the peak of the franchisees loving me. Not only had the small portions taken hold, not only was some of the menu innovation and systems technology we put in really starting to add value, the economy just started getting better, too, right? So, you're a leader in good times, you get a little credit you shouldn't get. So, they loved me. And then I get an email from one of the franchisees that said, 'WTF?'
And I thought it was a joke because he's normally like a really nice guy. And so, I call him and said, 'Haha, WTF?' And he said, 'This is not a joke. I'm sending you another email. Open it while I'm on the phone.' And in the email was a photo. And in the photo was something that would absolutely like gut me and have my heart drop into my stomach, which is it was a photo of a promise I had made the franchisees being broken.
And I had told them as we were expanding licensing and we were going into grocery chains that a new product we were launching was going to look very different from their core hero product, and it was supposed to. But something happened between my direction and what got sold into this grocery chain, and it ended up being exactly what my franchisees sell being sold for half the price. So, on the phone, I'm looking at a picture of what was not supposed to be in this grocery store, and a franchisee who loved me, who had up to that point been very grateful for all of my work helping his beloved brand get turned around, he said, 'You're a liar. You're just like everybody else building on the franchisees' back, and you can talk to our lawyers.'
So, it was one of these moments where outside of losing life and losing love, there is nothing worse than losing trust.
And it was apparent that it was gone. And I said to him, 'I need you to give me 24 hours because I know it is not acceptable for me to tell you this, but I don't know what happened. I don't know how this happened. And I need you to believe me and I'm going to figure it out.' So, I get off the phone with him. I go to the sales guy who's head of the channel and passed on the three-letter acronym. WTF, like what is this? And he looked at me and he goes, 'Oh, the little things, the different ones that you wanted them to have, they didn't want that. They wanted the big ones, so we just sent them the recipe.'
Without checking with you?
And I was like, and he goes, 'Kat, you said to get the deal done.' And in that moment, I realized a few things. One, I did want to immediately terminate his employment and throw all objects out a window, but I also recognized this is on me. Something happened where there wasn't a checkpoint. There wasn't an understanding or a belief. There should have been, right? Because that was such an egregious violation of what was committed.
But when I went to look at all the papers, everything was within our rights, nothing was against the contract or the law. We had the right to do it. We were selling 70,000 units a week. It was crushing. It was the right product, the right price, the right partner, but it wasn't handled right. So, I realized in some part of this process, in an effort for speed, a bias for speed, action, and innovation, and growth, while I couldn't have predicted that one specific thing would happen and go wrong, I should have known something would, which would have then created the need for more frequent checkpoints to catch whatever would be loose. And I didn't. We just ran fast, let's get it done, thought everyone understood the principles and the guardrails. Clearly, that was not the case.
So, I went back to the franchisees, fully owned it, and said, 'This happened on my watch. It shouldn't have. That is not what we made the deal to do. I'm going to kill the deal with this retailer,' which cost us millions of dollars. And this is where having a high-integrity financial sponsor or investor really matters because when I went to the CEO of the parent company and the private equity firm to tell them we needed to walk away from millions of dollars and pay millions of dollars in penalties to get out of this.
Well, of course you can imagine the lawyers and the accountants were like, are you sure you need to do this? Like the franchisees aren't going to be happy, but you had every right. You didn't violate any terms or conditions. And my answer was if I am supposed to be the president of this business, if I am supposed to grow this brand with these franchisees who are in a 20-year franchise agreement, it's like a marriage. It's a business and brand marriage. We can't do it on a bedrock of no trust. So, if the bigger idea is to grow the total business, this is a small price to pay for a mistake I made in not having systems in place.
And they supported me. The CEO of the parent company and the private equity firm said they did that. High integrity. And they said we support you. And this was in my first six months. The turnaround of the brand happened in the first six months and then this happened. And because we were pushing fast for that third bucket of innovating beyond the core. And so, I went to the franchisees and said we've killed the deal. And they were grateful, but still a little like we're not sure if we can trust them.
As the years went on we had more opportunities to expand the brand that were way more competitive and conflicting with the franchise business. But I had learned to handle it and manage it very differently in partnership with them. And in each case those franchisees would come to me and say, look what you're doing is making us nervous. Like, you're growing this beyond our historical core, but because of how you handled that situation, we trust you. And all those innovations that happened after, those are the things that tripled the business. Those are the things that brought more profitability to the business. So, in a way, that huge leadership failure that I had was an opportunity to create a deeper connection, to behave differently, to operate with more rigor, and to show the franchisees that I had the total brand in mind, never one growth vector at the expense of another. And that's what led to the incredible success of that brand.
And then I would go on and lead other divisions within the company, and then become the COO of the parent company at the age of 36, managing 3 billion in annual revenue and nine presidents of seven brands and two operating divisions reporting to me. So, it all worked out. It was a lot of fun.
How did the people on the ground, the franchisees and the employees in the restaurants, respond to having the president of the company working in the store, in the bakery?
Most of them loved it. At first, well, there were two things. One, there was me working in the bakeries the first 60 days, just legit, because I'm an operator and that's how I want to find out what's going on on the ground and use that to help me with my prioritization. A year and a half later, I would go on Undercover Boss and do it again with cameras.
Oh, I was just going to ask you. That sounds like Undercover Boss.
Undercover Boss with no cameras and then Undercover Boss with cameras. Yes.
And so, I would say, for the most part, employees felt really respected because I'm also not in there in like high heels and pointing around. I was in an apron, in the uniform, right alongside them. Rolling cinnamon rolls, taking out the trash, serving customers. So, that earns respect. Most people like that. And they would like to see how bad I was at some things. It's pretty funny to watch the president screw things up, and things that they were better at than me.
On the other hand, there were some managers who were nervous. Right? They'd think like, is she here to catch us doing things? What if she sees something she doesn't like? Am I going to get fired? They had had different interactions with generations of leadership in the past. So, and I knew the way some of them reacted to me had nothing to do with me.
It had to do with what they'd experienced in the past, and it was my job to help them understand why I was there. So when I would go store to store, manager to manager, when I introduce myself, I would take all the questions out of the room. I want to tell you why I'm here. I'm here to learn. I'm here so I can do the work with you, so you know that I care and I understand the work. I'm here to talk to customers and employees, and I'm here to make sure the decisions I make are in the best interests of our franchisees and our brand. I'm not here as a gotcha.
If there's something that you feel like isn't right that I should know, you're welcome to tell me. If there's something you don't want to tell me that you want to talk to your manager about, that's cool, too. And I'm not here to get in the way. Do not let me get in the way of a customer. Don't feel weird if I am in your way, please ask me to move out of the way. Every single visit started with that conversation. Set the tone, manage the expectations, empower them to focus on the customer and not me.
So now that after that you become the CEO of this huge restaurant conglomerate, and you're still single at the time?
Yes, still single. I had been in a long-term relationship, 11 years, so I was dating, very seriously dating, but not married and no kids. And so I was in that relationship until 2015, which was about halfway through my Focus Brands journey. So about the time I took over this bigger role.
Okay. And so, did you have in the back of your mind like, 'Hey, am I going to have kids? Like, what's up with family? You love your job, you're a workaholic.' Like, what were your thoughts on family and marriage?
My early thoughts on family were I believed I would be a mother. I just didn't know how.
That's the only thought I had. I had never envisioned myself being obsessed with pregnancy or traditional family life. I didn't grow up in the best family, and so none of that felt very glamorous to me, but I did have an inspirational mom. And I did feel like I could be that person in young people's lives. But there was a part of me that didn't know if they would actually be my kids or if I would adopt or if I would become a foster parent. I just knew I would be a mother, a mother figure to many, but I didn't have any specificity of when and how and in what conditions, but it was a deep knowing: I will mother someone's.
And then on marriage, I had no love for the institution because I grew up in, you know, a married family and that didn't go well, and everything I saw around me, many people weren't very happy, nor were they very healthy. And so, while I didn't begrudge it of anyone who loved it and wanted it and dreamt about it, it was not my jam. In fact, I was in an 11-year relationship from the time I was in my mid-20s to my mid-30s, and the idea of marriage never really even came up.
And maybe that was because I was so into my work. Maybe it was because that actually wasn't my person. And maybe it was because I needed time to like bake in the life oven to, you know, get to that point. But I felt so fulfilled. I mean, I have lived an unbelievably full life. Getting to travel around the world, you know, working at Hooters, opening franchises all over. I've seen metropolitan cities. I've gone to the best nightclubs. I partied. Like, I've lived a full life. And I've had incredible relationships around the world as well.
And it's interesting after that long-term relationship, that 11-year relationship. So, now think about it, I'm COO of this multi-billion-dollar business. I'm out of an 11-year relationship. So, I'm single, which is kind of odd because all my peers are mostly dudes in their 50s and 60s. And I'm in my mid-30s. Some of them had daughters my age. And I'm not even married yet and don't have kids yet.
And so, I thought at that point in my life, when I thought about companionship and the most intimate relationships, I had a vision. And my vision was, you know, maybe I'll just have a relationship on every continent. And I'll adopt some children. I'd done a lot of work in incredibly complex places and met many children who needed good homes. And so, I thought, that's for me. I'm going to have this like wild love life of people all over the world and I'll adopt children and be a single mom. My mom was a single mom. I can do it. Which was a crazy thought because it's a really hard thing to do. And so, that was in my mind in my mid-30s when I was in this huge job.
But, it was weird to try to go on a date or meet someone. Like, what am I going to do as a president and CEO? Just go like sit at a bar and wait to meet a dude. And I'm too busy traveling around the world. So, on one hand, I had these visions of this really creative free-form family life. But, I wasn't dedicating the time to try to do it. And then I was invited to this entrepreneurs weekend and met the love of my life, who's now my husband. Just 6 months, 6-7 months after I was out of that long-term relationship. And we've been together for 11 years.
And you knew immediately when you met him?
I mean, immediately. We were sitting in Baltimore. We were at an event where the police chief from Baltimore and a community leader who had navigated the riots. This was just after the Baltimore riots.
And so we were in a community center learning about community healing and leadership in times of high conflict. And so the police chief is sitting here and the community leader sitting here and they're talking to each other and I'm on this side and I look across and see the rows of other participants in this weekend's event and I see this guy and I look at him and I thought, 'I know him, but I have definitely never met him.'
And it was this deep sense of familiarity in like my head, my heart, and my stomach. It was butterflies times 10. It was quite distracting amidst a very serious conversation. So the event goes on and we end up at an after-party and if you had a time-lapse video of that night, we would look like two magnets who got close together and never separated.
And we proposed to each other 2 weeks later.
And he's an ultra-endurance athlete.
He is an ultra, ultra-endurance athlete in pursuit of being one of the, he would be the fourth person, I believe, to circumnavigate the globe on only human power, which means row the oceans in a rowboat, no motor, and cycle the continents. And so he has rowed the Atlantic, he has rowed the Caribbean in two parts after having to be rescued and almost dying, and he is almost complete with his US cycle and is plotting his Pacific row. And this is a hobby. He's an investor by day, but he plans these big events every few years and it's a joy for our family to be a part of it. And I don't do these crazy things. I like to say I'm adventure adjacent.
I don't know how it would be a joy thinking, 'Okay, he's halfway across the Atlantic Ocean and there's like, you know, a storm coming and he's only rowing.' Like, I don't think he's going to outrun a storm, meaning the storm's going to get him one way or the other.
Yeah, they capsize. The boats are great, though. They self-right, carbon fiber, looks like an open canoe. An ocean rowing vessel is a very specific type of vessel. I think I felt joy for him in these. One, I trust the vessel. I went through training when he first did the Atlantic row, and the family training was fantastic. And they said, 'Look, this boat can get cut in half. It's not going to sink.'
But if he becomes untethered, say goodbye.
Like, there's no coming back in the middle of the ocean. So, I had to trust the vessel and trust the training, and trust him. I also know he is at his best when he is pursuing something and training for something. And usually the training for these things takes more time than the event itself. And then the time away, that part sucks.
But it's also cool, you know, where it's like, 'This is pretty amazing what you're doing.' And now that we have kids, the first endeavor we didn't have kids.
The second row we did, and that's when he almost died. And had to be rescued. And he questioned himself having these wild pursuits more than I did at that point. He's like, 'I'm an idiot. We have two little kids. What am I thinking? Why am I doing this?' And I'm like, 'You know, you know your why.'
