Top Women in Grocery: How Grocery Outlet's CMO Takes the Brand to New Markets

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

You know, it's funny. I always tell people a lot of people at 5 years old or at 10 years old, they knew exactly what they were going to do and it's a very straight line from A to B and it's perfect. Mine's more like a weird zigzaggy path, lots of different careers before I ended up in marketing and definitely before I ended up in grocery. But I am an immigrant's kid, first generation. My dad came from the Middle East. He at some point started a business. When I was very young, I would go to the store, I would dust shelves. It was kind of like a deli and a grocery store. My favorite job there was to count the money. My dad would put the daily receipts in a brown bag and put it on top of the fridge. Then I'd get up at seven years old, pull the step ladder over, climb up there, face all the money, count it all, and make out the deposit slip. It was my favorite job. I started out working and being an entrepreneur very early on. I credit a lot of that to my dad because he gave me a chance and taught me things you don't normally learn, and in the Middle Eastern culture, definitely not for the girl. My dad sacrificed a lot to make sure I got opportunities. I started out working in restaurants in operations and then in training. In early days, I was on the road opening franchises for different companies, meeting lots of people, hiring and training. Eventually, being on the road got difficult and I started thinking I could do my own business. So I started a restaurant and was an entrepreneur. In that process, I realized the most important part of building and what you do is marketing, because you can build the best restaurant, have the best menu, best food, best service, but if nobody knows you're there, you're not going to succeed. I learned a lot about marketing doing that and eventually decided I really like to market but don't really like anything else in this business. I did it for seven years, decided to sell, and went and chased trying to get a marketing job without professional marketing training. That was really hard. It was hard to get people to give you a chance. But I worked so hard. Every time I got a little chance, a little foot in the door, I would just really hustle. I credit a lot of the women in my life that I've known for a very long time for helping me with that. As an example, I went to my 20-year high school reunion and bumped into a friend I knew 20 years before and hadn't really stayed in touch with. She owned a media buying company. We met afterwards for lunch and she asked what I was looking to do. I said I really wanted to get into marketing and thought I could do some good. She said one of her clients was looking for a senior manager of marketing and she could get my resume in front of her. She did, I got in, and then my lovely friend Amy spent a lot of time teaching me how to do media buys and talk to different radio and TV stations. There's been a lot of women that have helped me along the way. I definitely took a zigzaggy road to get where I'm at now. But I always loved food, so I've stayed in food. I parlayed the restaurant into eventually someone at Sprouts gave me a crack at a director of marketing, and I've been in grocery ever since.

Yeah, I always say this job was kind of made for me because it really celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of people that really want to own a business but maybe don't have the ability to outlay the millions of dollars you'd have to put down to open a restaurant or a grocery store. Grocery store takes an incredible amount of money and expertise to build, find sites, all the things you need to do. It's a beautiful marriage of entrepreneurial spirit and the backing of a corporate brand and all the bells and whistles you need to be successful. That idea of having a known brand and your ability to, even though you have a known brand, be yourself, bring your whole self to work, hire people you want, sell the things you want, and be a part of the community you want to be in. Grocery Outlet has been here going into my ninth year. I love it. People that come here love it. People that work on the corporate side all have that entrepreneurial spirit. It's how we help the people that are actually the real entrepreneurs in the trenches every day. It's a great opportunity for people to own a business. We have lots of women in the system, they're incredibly successful. It's a wonderful place. I think Grocery Outlet really is the most fun you're going to have in a grocery store, whether you're working or shopping.

Yeah, there's a lot of women that own a Grocery Outlet. There are single women, just them on their own. We love when we have partners, so we like to have two people. There's a lot of husband and wife teams, and the women in this business are the heart of the business. It's amazing when we have husband and wife and then the families. You go into a lot of stores and you've got a husband and wife and their four kids all working there. We have several scenarios where those kids get their own store, so there's multiple generations either in one store or owning multiple stores in the same area, allowing them to stay together. We've got lots of women that are sisters or friends or life partners. We love to see that because it's a true representation of what's happening in the world and in the US today. There's a lot of women that want to chart their own course, have their own business, and strike out. It's nice to be able to have an opportunity and a place for them to come and succeed with assistance on the other side. A lot of independent businesses, as you know, I owned my own business, I didn't have any brand behind me or corporate behind me. It's really tough to make the bills, be ahead of trends, and afford things you need. It's wonderful that we have this opportunity to really champion women to own their own business and be super successful for a significantly less investment than you'd have to do somewhere else.

I think you asked this question, I don't think I got there. How hard is it to market this? It's pretty challenging to market a business where the stuff on the shelf isn't the same at every store. In Ohio, that operator might like a certain thing and their community will love it, but no one else around buys it. The assortment is different, the owners are different, locations are different. Everything about it is different. But what's the same is the moment you go in that store and you find something you didn't think you could find, that moment of bliss. When you're dealing with those kinds of marketing challenges where there's so much different, you have to focus on what makes you special and key in on that. I'm not going to key in on the fact that it's not all the same assortment. The way I spin that is you never know what you're going to find, so deals don't last, shop it fast, you see it, clean the shelf because that's how it goes. Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't. That's the beautiful part, the surprise and the epiphany and the bliss of Grocery Outlet. I try to focus on what makes it different and fun. For new markets, a lot of this is getting people to understand the heart of the business, not necessarily the milk, butter, eggs, the stuff you can buy anywhere. It's why are we different, how do we do it different. In markets like Ohio, we talk a lot about who's owning those stores, who's working in them, what jobs they're providing, what community support they do. We have a huge community giveback component at Grocery Outlet, we're very proud of that. The thing I'm proudest of is that the owners get to pick who their partner is. That's one of the most beautiful things because the community knows what they need, the owner knows what they're connecting to, and that's the story. We focus a lot on the actual people of the business, not so much that you're going to get a great shop, clean shop, best price in town. We have outlet and bargain in our name, we better have a good price, that's table stakes. But what you get that you don't think you're going to get is the friendly service, the heart of the people that work there, how proud they are of their business, and the unique way they position their business every day. You don't get that from a lot of other chains.

Yeah.

I think the most important lesson in general I've taken, and this again is from my dad, you got to fail a lot and you fail fast and you fail forward. The really cool stuff happens when you fall on your face. I speak a lot to women's groups and I always say, 'Hi, my name is Layla and I'm a complete and total failure. I'm a professional failure. I do it a lot, I've gotten really good at it.' I do think women struggle with failing. We feel like we have to do everything and can't let anything slip or make a mistake. The challenge we have as women is we got to be able to fail or we're not going to learn and grow and nothing cool is going to happen because if you don't take a risk, you're never going to figure out what works. I've had a really good soft spot to fall with my family. I have a great husband. When I fall on my face, I know they're not going to be like, 'What are you doing?' When I was a kid, I'd come home from school and my dad would say, 'What'd you screw up today?' People get horrified when I tell them that, but I'm so glad he did because it made me feel like that was okay. When I said I screwed something up, he'd say, 'Okay, well, how are we not going to do that again next time?' It gives you a really good base for being a risk taker. I guarantee you I would not be sitting doing what I do and loving it like I do if I wasn't willing to take a risk. I think it's pretty stupid that at 35 I was like, 'I think I want to go into marketing.' I'd never done it, didn't take a class, did a lot of bootstrapping and boot camps that were marketing related, but I liked it. I'm going to go try. People think you're crazy when you say stuff like that. I think that's a big life lesson in general. Marketing wise, my marketing lesson would be: you're not the customer. Maybe you are, but most of the time you're not. You need to be really savvy in that. Oftentimes when I talk to people, they say, 'Well, I've never seen an ad for Grocery Outlet or something else.' I was having this conversation with somebody last week at a breakfast about a restaurant brand. He said, 'Layla, I don't think they're doing a good job marketing because I've never seen their ads.' I said, 'Bob, you're 82 years old. You are not the demo. They're not trying to find you. You should be saying it's really smart, they're being super effective with their money because I don't see the ad. You're not looking for an $8 salad, Bob.' He was like, 'Oh, I never thought of that.' You have to always keep in the top of your mind who is my customer. It's not about what you like or what the CEO likes or what other business partners like. It's what your customer is going to respond to. One of the hardest things you have to say in the boardroom is, 'Hey guys, it's not about you. I'm not talking to you. Does anyone at this table do their own grocery shopping every week?' You might get one or two hands, but generally you aren't going to get a lot of people in high-end positions that are out every week doing their grocery shopping. I'm trying to hit the people that love Grocery Outlet, want this experience, are doing their daily shop. Sometimes that's not who is sitting in the room with you, and you have to remind them, and sometimes it's not you, and that's okay. You just got to keep the customer in mind.

I credit a lot of my success to women. Women that have pulled me up, women that have brought me back down to earth, women that have taught me things. I'm at the point now where I still have a mentor and I'm blessed enough that she is actually my boss at Grocery Outlet. She is a dream of a woman, Pam Burke. She's amazing. But I mentor a lot. I have a lot of mentees too. At this point in my career, I really want to help other women. Pam and I, along with a couple other women at Grocery Outlet, Lindsay Gray and Karen Hey, who has since retired, the four of us in 2019 created the WOW network at Grocery Outlet. It's Working with Outstanding Women, a women's network. We really wanted to offer opportunity for all the women at Grocery Outlet to learn how to advance, get other life skills, business skills. We've had poker tournaments and taught poker. I didn't realize that was a thing, but when we took Grocery Outlet public, NASDAQ invited me to a poker tournament. I was the only woman there. I had no idea how to play poker. I had to teach myself poker. I came back saying to Pam, 'We need to do a poker night because this is apparently the new way people are going to do business.' I used to the golf course, now it's poker. Who knew? I also will say I was at the final table even though I was the only chick, and I had no idea what I was doing. Well done. But it was also interesting because when I checked in for the event, there were two women checking people in. I saw them start to whisper and I said, 'Did I not sign up right?' They said, 'No, you're the only woman and we were dying to see who you were going to be.' I think it's important for us as women that are farther along in their career to really put their hand back and pull women up. I talk about it a lot, I'm very passionate about it. For women that are towards the tail end of their career, I think it's important to know that the most important voice in the room is the voice that's there when you're not in it. When we're in the boardroom and in executive meetings, it's really important to be the voice for the people that aren't in that room yet but want to get in. I think it's so critical and undervalued. I didn't realize how undervalued it was until I realized I actually had it and didn't know I had it. It came back to me like, 'Hey, Pam is really in that room fighting for you.' She never once told me she was saying that, but it's important. I try to be that for women on my team and women across our business. Crossing over from marketing into women in construction, real estate, HR, all over the business operations, the WOW network is really valuable. I encourage people that don't have that at their current company or aren't involved to get involved. It is the most rewarding thing to be able to do something like that and give advice or help other women that are starting out. I also belong to a group called Women in Retail Leadership Circles, Whirl. I'm sure maybe you're familiar with it. Summit is next week, very excited. That's another network where if you're looking for a mentor, there's a lot of us there that love to sit down and have lunch or coffee with you and give tips. Every year I go back and someone will say, 'Hey, I got promoted. Thanks for the advice.' There's a lot working against us still, and helping each other is the best way for us to get through it. I think it's really critical for women to be able to do that for each other.

Yep. Doesn't feel great when you're doing it, but man, it takes off.

Absolutely. Great. Thanks for having me.