#110 with Kat Cole - Ideas From the Head of a $4B+ Business

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back k so kat cole is here she's the president of many brands including my favorite brand of all time ci but did i get that is that true or i just get getting excited about it that's right okay and yeah so give people kinda like i don't know like the two minute summary like who are you why should people be excited to listen to this i like to let people sell themselves because hey you'll do it better than me and b most people were really afraid of bragging and i'm like no no this is the time to brag for two minutes just bragging and then we'll be humble the rest of the time but for two minutes tell people why it up yeah flex so i run a company as president and coo called focus brands four to five billion in global consumer product sales just under seven thousand units sixty countries seven food brands that people know and love ci auntie carve jean juice mo southwest grill mca and sc skis the business grows by acquisition so we're constantly looking for new brands that are big enough to make sets in our portfolio but have enough upside potential in multi channel retail franchise cp g growth to bring them in and apply all of our strengths to those brands to build them over time so two two questions okay three what's your favorite in bond let's start with that i love the ci mini bond it's not mini because the classic is giant so it's just like it's more normal sized normal lot you won't hate yourself later bon that's very so second do you guys have not so i see all the food brands do you guys do non food brands or you specifically focused in the food all food all food and franchising as the core legacy business and then even better if it's extend into other licensed formats in grocery products and and even better if it can port around the world gotcha and are you guys public or this a private company private equity oh private equity okay gotcha okay so you're a baller that's amazing how did you get here are you kind of like i worked my way up from mail clerk for you know twenty years and now i'm the president coo or did you have some other career and you kind of side stepped into this how'd you get where you're i was kinda like the great poet drake started at the bottom no i'm here i am one of those stories so i started out as a hostess and waitress when i was seventeen eighteen years old at hoo restaurants putting myself through college first person in my family to get into college grew up the child of a single parent alcoholic father helped raise my sisters and so i just had to you know work to pay for school and i was the first person to get into school and so everybody was really excited and then something really crazy happened hoo happened to be growing around the world at the time that i was a waitress and i was asked to be a part of the training team that would go launch the franchise on different continents around the world and so i said yes i started doing that australia and central america south america asia i did that so much i was traveling i had to be in these countries for twenty to forty days to launch the franchise i very quickly moved from being on the team to leading the teams and by the time i was twenty i'd had opened up the franchise on most continents and was failing college because i was never there so i dropped out of school before i got my two year degree luckily since the company was growing there were many corporate job opportunities for people with my experience in the company and so i moved to atlanta from jacksonville and took my first corporate gig with a paycheck instead of cash and dips and right and and found my way into the professional world and and again the company grew i grew i was vice president of that company when i was twenty six while they were doing seven to eight hundred million in revenue stayed with that executive team all kinds of really interesting things during that executive tenure that we could double click on later started my humanitarian work in eastern africa did a lot of non profit leadership that gave me some really cool parallel leadership experiences that allowed me to be just a better leader at a younger age than many people because i was leading my like my day gig my nonprofit on the side humanitarian work and eventually when i was thirty one well before that went back to school i have my masters without having a bachelor's so i went through and said allowed nights and weekends it is allowed it is rare but possible and that's the the story of my life rare but possible and and then became the president of ci and helped turn that around out of the recession and again as that company grew i grew every three years have had a a different and larger gig and now oversee all the business okay that's amazing so we i i did tell you when you came i was like we're gonna talk ideas yeah because i try to warn everyone because whenever some legit guest comes on they're just like cool you're just gonna ask me about me and then i already know that story so i don't need to prep and i just go on the show for sure and they show that and i'm like hey you know what are you know what are some cool things you're seeing tell me about the future not your past and they're like wait what the hell is this so i gave you the idea but i gotta i gotta ask you some questions about your past because that was okay but i wanna get to the ideas because i might know we were excited about them to do i'm actually gonna look at the clock right now i'm gonna make sure that i i i stop myself at some point but i have two questions for you so the first one is you come from such a non traditional background mh you get into these leadership roles one thing a lot of people feel is what they call like impostor syndrome where you're like okay they gave me the keys of this car do i know how to drive and like you know do i really know what the hell i'm doing and like some people i've i've met two different types people people who felt that and then they sort of you know danced with it and overcame it in some way and i found other people who i've met other people who are like i you know what i understand that but i've literally i never felt that way that was curious when you were like okay it sounds like you dropped out of a two year right so you dropped out of a community college and now you're you know twenty five twenty six years old your vp of you know a a multi multi hundred million dollar brand did you have those feelings or was that not something that registered for you kind of a mixed bag i love that you've talked to people that have both responses right for me the way a version of that showed up when people talk about impostor syndrome i've found that some are talking about slightly nuance different experiences like one is just this this self talk i don't deserve to be here you know do they do they think i don't deserve to be here is everybody looking at me like what is she doing here right so there's that worry that internal talk but then there's another version that was more what i experienced so that first version i haven't experienced but the the version that i've experienced is an over indexing on humility and curiosity at times when i really needed to pull forward more courage and confidence right and i would ask myself in my head because i respect did the people i was now a peer of so much who in the early days they had been in business longer than i'd been alive literally i was a twenty six year old executive and they were in their fifties and sixties they had worked for thirty years right and so there was something in my head that whether it was caused by them or not that made me ask who am i to question them you know it was it's it comes from a place of deep respect and there were times where i had the humility to ask that question but i should have had more courage to answer it and the answer is you are the vice president overseeing these functions and if you don't ask these questions no one will and i learned very quickly because i had so much responsibility at such a young age when i did not use my voice when i had a seat that i would later regret it and whether that was bringing up something that was supposed to be what i was there to advocate for a particular stakeholder group or just an idea that i had that could have saved us a ton of money or made us a ton of money or helped to do something better and i just held back because i thought again who am i have kinda wedged that into these guys historically guys discussion and i always regret it and so i learned from that pain from that regret that i shouldn't over index on humility humility is good but it i i need to pair it with confidence and courage so that i'm always showing up in the way that i should yeah yeah that that's that's a good way putting it like it's the that's the classic thing like your strength is always also your weakness depending on the context and so if you if you over index on any one thing whether it's confidence that's right confidence becomes arrogant that's right intense if it's humility humility becomes you know you know i don't know what the word would be but sort of that that mouse feeling where you didn't step up and you didn't do the thing that you were trying to be nice and that's actually the nicest thing would have been to step up and say something and i'll share a little story of mind that that's sort of similar so i i started my career as a as as a i can't even call a career i was a college kid i thought i was go to med school and then i had this idea to start a sushi restaurant and i went and decided i'm gonna build the chipotle of sushi wow so yeah i i come from the quick serve kinda background that was the very first thing i did and i got the confidence to do it i think i've just told the story once before but i got the do it because i took this class at my university called getting rich there's my senior year i done all my that was my name of the class does the name of the class and it was it was actually really funny it was taught by this woman lisa ke who changed my life she i i should email her and tell her she changed my life she had graduated and she had graduated with a degree in manager and all of her friends were like going to know become bankers consultants lawyers they knew what they were doing they're were on that track that pre approved track of like this is what a good career looks like and they were like this you know twenty years ago they're like what are you gonna do with this mandarin degree what the hell is that you know she was like i don't know but like i bet i could find a job in china like if i if i could speak i even can she went over there and she found a great career basically bridging companies in china with who wanted to do business with the west and she was like i could speak with languages i was a friendly face i could make it happen and so she makes it killing by twenty two twenty three she comes back to the state she invest at all in the dot com boom because she's like oh the internet this is a great thing and invest at all gets this huge run up fortunately decides like you know what i wanna buy house and i wanna like change things up pulls it all out right before the crash so she avoids the crash you know not because of some genius but then invested on real estate so then from two thousand you know one to two thousand six he's in real estate which is also on this huge run up and then she takes out by thirty she's retired she's married with you know to the man of her dreams and she's done at all and she's like what i wanna do now so she's like man everything that helped me you know succeed in life i didn't learn in school so she decided to like you know go back to the university that she went to which is do where i went and she decided to become a professor and teach the class she wished she had and she she named it getting rich because she's like i know this will attract the type of person i want and it's not gonna be a class about getting rich it's gonna be a little bit about personal finance you learn a little bit about the way money works and then every class i'm gonna bring in a speaker like someone like you who would come in and say hey here's my path here's how i stumbled into success like i didn't didn't have some magic clarity when i got started i just sort did one thing and then the next thing and then eventually i figured it all out and i took the load road less travel so anyways i heard that and that's why when i was like oh shit these people who are telling their story about know starting a t shirt company or you know becoming the vice president of jpmorgan they all said the same thing which was like just as clueless as you back when i was twenty years old and just started following my nose of the most interesting thing tried to do a great job of it and whether i succeeded or failed up this is america it's amazing you can even fail and and you you go up and so and they were like look at the end of the day i'm the one hiring people you know so i'll tell you what i look for in a resume everybody's got the same degree you know every you know i go down at the bottom of the resume where it says like other and i tried to figure out do you have anything to offer me any other experiences in your life that are novel are different because that's what separates you from the other stack and the other people in the stack of papers so anyways long story but i'm gonna get to the part that was relevant to what you said which was i do a couple startups ups i fail essentially with them like minor success failure really and then i decide okay i'm coming to silicon valley that's where i wanna be and i joined this ideal lab started by this guy michael wu who had him and his wife had built multiple companies multiple successes and now they were sort of like well we're billionaires but we still wanna create new startup up new start ideas but now we don't need investors we'll do it on our own terms so they they buy this pi out office in san francisco they smashed together seven condos and create their dream office out of that and then they hire up a team at twenty of the smartest engineers and they're like great we own this whole thing you all own equity in any project we do it's like sort of communism for startups and you know we're gonna build our our own ventures and so i joined him just to work for him and i i didn't know what the hell i was doing but i knew two things one was i i had this idea was how do i get twenty years of experience in the next four kinda like what you were saying which was like mh by throwing yourself in the fire and being like i'll you rose your your press time i'll go launch you know our australia business or wherever like you will go learn a lot more that way so that's why i joined his startup lab because i was like oh a lab has multiple ideas so i will get multiple reps rather than just focusing on one thing and i'll learn from this guy who's done it before so i'll get a bunch of experience just sitting next to him every day and that's what happened but along the way he emailed me one day and he was like hey meet me at this coffee shop today they don't come to work meet me at this coffee shop you know the something i like to discuss and i was like you know six months into the job and i was like oh shit i'm getting fired like i heard this is what happens they take you off and they sort shoot you where nobody could see you and you know because i've been changing a whole bunch of things i had been doing the thing you said which was like if i saw something that didn't make sense me i would just say it didn't make sense and i'd change it without even asking for permission and i was like i probably overs stepped and okay whatever lesson learned i told my mom i was like i'll be home for lunch i'm probably getting fired today and i i go meet this guy and his wife and he was basically like is the exact opposite he was like you know he's like every single person i ever hired at this lab twenty people i hired and i said you know make of this what you want you know whatever you make of this is what your experience will be he's like i told all of them that and then whatever everyone does is they go and they said sit at their desk and they wait to be told what to do and they just do what they think their job title is and he's like we hired you as product manager but you've been acting like the ceo of this this lab and i wanna make you the ceo i'm gonna give you my job and i'll i'll move to the board and you run this this thing and i was twenty four years old and in that moment i had this fear like kind of what you were talking about the the nuance number one that you mentioned and the fear i had was and i asked him this this is how i got over the fear i asked him i was like you know i'm the youngest person at the company i'm twenty four people i'm i've been here the least long i've only been for six months are other people gonna be okay with us like i get that you're crazy but like ultimately you're gonna leave and i'm gonna be the one standing in front of them and if they don't respect me screwed and he told me this he gave me this anecdote and i think i honestly think he made this up but it worked it totally made me feel great which was he goes he goes i talked to you know these four leaders of the cup of the team you know already i asked them how they feel about this they all were supportive in fact you know paul called me yesterday and was like dude are you making this transition yet like what's the hold up and and that just gave me this like wind in my sales and i was like oh they want me to lead then i never questioned it again and now looking back i'm like i think you might have made that shit up that might have been like totally not true but it was a real gift that he gave me and so for anybody out there who's putting somebody in a position where you know they're punching a little bit above their weight they're they're not you know sort of technically on the resume qualified to do this give them that gift of like people want you to lead they trust you in some way somehow it it really changed my experience it sounds like for you you you had that on your own so alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website i actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this three d sensor and what it does is they give you weight like a hundred and fifteen pounds of weights and it's for strength training so what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting it sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in your part rate is it's pretty amazing and then you have a coach on screen walking you through what's to lift how many to lift what workout to do whether you wanna do a twenty minute ten minute fifty minute workout it's pretty amazing but the best part is the leader board the other stuff all the features that they have that's cool but i'm obsessed with the leader board because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class so it's maybe wanna work harder lift more weight or have more endurance it's just pretty freaking fun and the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that'll make you live longer and this product tempo it checks that box for me so they're our sponsored today if you use the code sam one hundred so that's the promo code sam one hundred you'll get a hundred dollars off so tempo dot fit is the url and sam one hundred one word you'll get a hundred dollars off so check it out i use it if you look me up on twitter you'll see i'm always filming videos where i'm talking to that company say i'm trying to crush their employees on the leader board because i actually love this thing and i and i use it all time so check it out anyways i know why i made this all about me but i i compelled to tell you that story that's okay we're getting close to the idea tell me more don't me more yeah let me talk about my ideas now let's do the ideas so i asked you the homework was one to three ideas you might have exceeded that i don't know let me ask you are you an ideal person do you like constantly have ideas my stuff where do you capture or where do you write them in your phone or notes on or something yeah phone voice notes and do you plan to do anything with these or you just gotta like get it off your chest i am very good about socializing ideas as soon as i have them okay so i just put them out there even if it's like oh maybe i could actually do something with this if somebody else moves faster on it cool if they don't cool like and you just tweet out i just talk it out i'll just talk with a friend of so many creative friends and on people in the entrepreneurial world and so yeah i just share i i was thinking about this wouldn't it be great if this existed did you use this if this existed so give me one of them what's what's on your mind okay one that i actually started this was know six nine months ago started messaging a few investor friends and people i know are passionate about this topic and they loved the idea i got busy so maybe somebody will do something with this so an app that lets me enter all the life decisions that i want to enter and evaluate and measure my real environmental impact so the shampoo i buy the method of transportation i have my food choices and i wanna score right just for me and then if there's a enough if there are enough people participating enough data points it can kinda of benchmark by region by different demographic if i opt in to show that because there is so much green washing that there are things that are promoted or advertised as better for the planet that when i've had occasion to work with experts or go deep into the research of the entire value chain it's actually not and they're you know there are websites right now that rank products in this way so ew g you know whatever version it's become now where you can put in your sku scan the barcode and it'll tell you if it's like green yellow or red or if it's good fair bad or horrible for for the planet or if it's got concerning ingredients for your body so like a really soup up version of that where it's easy to click transportation home utilities food whatever it is and i put it in and then i can see how the choices i make add value to right the planet or are hurting and it for me it's just about driving more consciousness and then of course sc it and like do all kinds of things and it could actually create energy around the growth of companies that really are net better for the planet so there just feel like there's a lot of good that could come from that right and have you made any shifts recently that your lights oh i wasn't aware of x but now i do y and it's better for the planet have you have you done anything like that well i use the the what was formerly brand is the ew g app that where i can just put products in and it has you know both packaging some some packaging measurements as well as more ingredients for the body and so i've just shifted product choices based on the information in the app but it's still only covering product purchases not car not you know transportation and lawn care and home goods and my children's clothing and all the all the consumption items all the choices that i'm making i just i would love that same level of consciousness without having to do all the work of the research and then running into light research and making actually a a decision that's not based on the depth of everything that a product or service actually involved so it it doesn't exist i've looked everywhere nothing is this comprehensive right so let me tell you what i like and i'll tell you what i dislike about it maybe you could tell me why i'm wrong so what i like about it actually is well besides the like net good that would come of something like this what i like about it is that i think you could start this as a quiz so i've noticed just in trying to make things move on the internet quizzes are like i don't know they're like the bacteria of the internet they just spread like crazy and you know i was telling you about michael who was the kinda ceo of the lab he had launched he got big on a social network it was like kind of as big as my myspace back in the day as big as facebook and he had launched it with a quiz and in nine days he got a million members wow in that was that was really fast like a million was a lot back then in the internet size and he had did it with just a quiz called the best friend's quiz base which basically i was like how well do you know me i answer questions about me and then i sent it to you you get a score of guessing how i what i would have said and then i'll do the same back for you and it was a viral quiz the the guys who were behind tickle i remember did this with which dog breed are you right buzzfeed did this and so i think that there's one way to onboard people with this which is just like question question question question question score and how does that compare to blah blah and so you don't even have to make it doesn't even have to start as a full fledged you know app app it can be something that just collects a whole bunch of people's information and interest around their lifestyle choices so i makes them more energized about a deeper engagement on the platform to enter and things like that exactly so i love that it could be formatted as a quiz as a starting point as a wedge and then the part that i dislike is i the one thing about these quizzes that works well is when you get a result that you like so it says something good about you by fear would be would people end up getting bad news or just basically like i feel like we're all screwing up the planet and we all have pretty like cons consumption lifestyles if that's a word and i don't know anyone who's gonna score well on this and so i think you'd can get a bunch of people to like would people opt into doing something results in them feeling somewhat guilty i'd like to think yes because then they'll change but i think what will end up having because people will avoid it just like they avoid stepping on the scale if they know they're gonna out you know overweight or whatever yeah and so that's my my interesting point i'm such a a geek around like psychological models and human behavior and i just think humans are magic and fascinating right and so i love where you're going with that i my thinking and i haven't thought about this too deeply beyond sharing it with some you know fellow fellow thinkers around making better decisions for the planet who happened to be investors are very entrepreneurial my thinking is that one i think you're right people already know it's bad and and that's different right because sometimes people don't wanna get bad news when it conflicts with how good they think they already are right and this is like i know i'm bad and i actually wanna get better it's why i'm using it and so tell me how bad i am you know to me and and or i'm already this conscious i'm gonna show you that i'm actually on a journey i'm yellow not red right but my my teenage son or my partner or my friend i really wanna get them into this or my mom or my dad i'm trying to get them to make better choices and and maybe it's not just that it's red yellow green but it actually in some way using psychology communicates what is actually bad about that if this continues with this many people around the world here's what will happen to your grandchildren climate here's what the world looks like yeah you know something like that like i think the good thing about this is even if a lot of people are in that bucket where they're like it's bad and i don't wanna hear the bad news like for example my wife is vegan and so she will you know if she's talking to her mom m right her mom i when her mom was growing up the vegan wasn't a word that wasn't a lifestyle so you know she's now in her sixty she doesn't she's not gonna change to being vegan but she loves animals and cares about it and so when she brings up my my when my wife brings up this information like do you know how that showed up on your plate and do you know what you know how dairy works right do you know how that how bad these systems are and her mom is just like i don't wanna know don't tell me it's just gonna ruin my like my day like please don't tell me i'm not ready to change blah blah but the thing with this is this is a product where every it's everybody is the total market we're all we're all humans on planet earth so even if it's just five percent of the population that actually would opt in into knowing this information that's a huge number of people and they can sort of bring on that next wave of people who are looking to be more conscious and that that will just sort of cascade through the population over time so maybe my initial thing was it doesn't matter because there's enough people the total breast of market it's everybody so there's enough people who would opt in to finding out this information and then the other sort of interesting thing that you brought up was like psychology right so one of the guys who taught at at the school i went to this has got dan ariel alley who's wrote a bunch of books like predictably irrational he started like the leader in kind of like behavior like an pop science you know i'm familiar actually yeah because it's commonly applied in met approaches to menu and the food business and sales and things like that right i remember he was saying he was working with panda express at one time and they're trying to get people to make healthy choices and they were trying to figure out how do we how do we label our menus so people make healthy choices should we include cal you know this information or what and the experiment he wanted to try which i think ultimately didn't work because they didn't implement this but the experiment he wanna try was when you walk through the door there's actually two lines there's the i'm like i'm gonna treat myself or i'm i'm gonna make a good decision for myself and but both are positive but it was like go left or right and then the menu you see is a different menu and you just only get the options but you make the choice up upfront you don't have to like wade through the tasty and then the like maybe healthier options and try to figure it out so i don't think that one work but he did tell us about one experiment that did work in the psychology realm around around climate so he was talking about he's like why is it that people will buy a prius or the buy an electric car now and then tesla maybe down but they won't do they won't like ins their water heater or something that will have like actually quit quite a big impact actually that and they you know they won't do that but they'll like you know vi signal in other ways you know they'll they'll recycle a bottle but they won't change this thing that's actually like a bigger impact why do people do that and so he's like i think he's like i think it's about signaling i think that there's mh there's the power optics yeah yeah the optics like you feel good that you are signaling to the world that you do good and with your ins your water heater it's in a closet somewhere in your house in your garage or something like that no one sees it you don't even see it and so the motivation to do it is very very low it's only for the die and so he then they ran this experiment in a neighborhood where they would put a sign in the in the i ran read about loss yeah he had this amazing so you put the sign that said like hey we upgraded our heater we went clean clean and green or something and so you were signaling to everybody that our house we did the thing and as you know in a neighborhood when five houses did it then everybody felt like oh which probably not be the neighbor who did is i can withstand a that doesn't do this right and so i i love that i i love that idea and how are you can apply that into product design i think it's cool so okay i love this idea give me another one whatever else we got so i think there is an opportunity there's a there's a theme here of of impact but i think there are real business opportunities here and and they're just needed entities and it you're a good person you real you're a good person about we understand okay so next is food business like restaurant so i think you know the whole restaurant world's being blown up right now right like rights sizing of retail independent tours casual dining fine dining being heavily disrupted alongside other food trends so first i'm thinking of starting kind of the the modern food chain the un franchise franchise that is about healthy food but food as pharmacy where you go in you get a diagnosis in some way from some network of doctors that take your blood test and do all these things and are like this these are the types of things you you need to eat menu a right and and then there's a this chain of restaurants that has menu a b c something more fabulous marketed than that but you get the point and and it's this like beautiful delicious place that that ignites the senses that blends the pleasure of food and the functionality of food and very clearly communicates it as food is medicine but it's not just that positioning of healthy it is what i think the future of restaurants really will be which is if you were building one today it would be the best of all worlds it would be part sit down with a lot of outdoor and kind of space right built for delivery built for pickup built for takeout and speed it would have meal kits to go items that you could pick up it's a little bit grocery store a little bit convenient store a little bit restaurant it's a lot off premise and production with all the design elements of coming in and out really safely and easily with fully contact list experience so it's not only the what it sells at scale is a part of the future of food but it's the how it does it and the routes to market that are not just these old models that have patchwork of some of these channels like start over from ground zero bringing all these things together in one place make it a franchise so local entrepreneurs local independent operators can have a part of scaling this future of food and make sure it's at a pricing tier that is low to mid so it is broadly accessible and not just the aspirational type of product that is typically introduced to the market that one's not as far off as the first one and there's little symbol little signs of it happening in certain markets but no one's doing it with that much clarity that much intention at scale maybe i will one day post focus brands well i i mean you could see which industry you're and you know right so so i got a couple of questions for you first what do you think of i'll react your idea in a but i wanna know what do you think of ghost kitchens in general so one i i think a delivery only or an off premise mostly model is going to only continue in popularity and prominence around the world the math really only makes sense today in hyper densely populated areas because you have to have enough delivery only business only through a digital channel right to warrant the rent and the supportive infrastructure that and i'm very familiar with what all those are as you can imagine the different companies that are doing at kitchen united cloud kitchens all the ones doing it around the world so so you've gotta really have not only a different marketing engine to market digitally for what are typically impulse purchases you know i'm hungry i want food now right what type do i want what's gonna be fastest which brand do i trust am i in the mood to experiment do i have time to experiment you know all the respect psychology all the psychology that goes on you've got market differently and transact differently so in hyper dense markets many cities in china many cities in india kuwait manhattan this has been going on delivery only businesses for decades it's not new they just also had some customer facing part of their business and then you looked at it and said wow we're paying premium for this real estate if most of our revenue is gonna be delivery which only makes sense in very dense markets in most cases right and because you need the cost of delivery to be low and you need the time of delivery to be low in order to properly batch and keep it efficient whether you're a third party or a self delivery person and you've got your three kids driving around in the scooter delivering the food doesn't matter the delivery time has to be fast the radius has to be short the only way the radius is short is if the density is there and so cloud kitchens are crushing driving crushing it dark kitchen cloud kitchen whatever you wanna call it in hyper dense markets there is a lot of churn in tenants in cloud kitchens in not dense people are excited about it they're trying it and they're going oh i only have delivery revenue and that's not necessarily working for the economics that these companies that are trying to do this at scale really need to make it work i think it's all gonna work itself out in north america we are just so behind the rest of the world in delivery only concepts me pizza obviously has figured it out for a long time right but the the whole economics of the model the digital infrastructure and they have their own driver that works so it makes a lot of sense other industry sectors are trying to come at it from the outside owning your own driver infrastructure is very expensive competitive and the insurance alone is something a lot of small businesses can't bear so using a last mile logistics partner like in uber eats or door in the us which they are they do have big growing parts of their businesses that are last mile only not marketplace not front end but back end although though it's just all kind the puzzle pieces are coming together they're coming together so we they're they've they're already like clicked and glued around the world they're just slowly coming to together in the in the us and they're coming together faster and dense markets i'm a fan it's just not as not as much the oh yeah totally that's the solution today as a lot of people think or some of the hype bias heard because they clearly don't understand the economics but it's getting there it's it depends mh it's yes it's it's depends asterisk and for for you guys i mean i can imagine how many locations you have throughout suburban malls and you know you know all across america where you're not gonna be in this this type of hyper density and what you're saying is that for that for that you need a a very different model than than what you're gonna get in you know downtown new york or la or discourse i would say on the other side however that some of the brands we have we are one of the original multi brand platforms that c brands and tri brands we can put multiple concepts together because they meet different occasions they're not competitive but they're complementary and they make sense to be together so if they ci auntie and jam yep or ci auntie in carb and we can sm them together in really tiny spaces we've been doing it for a long time in airports and malls and urban centers so that does make it interesting for cloud kitchen in that we can put multiple brands so i don't have to rely on one brand's revenue stream delivery only to make it work in a cloud kitchen i can actually put three brands together in a pretty small kitchen but you need to then take different day parts and then maybe it's got a fighting chance when it's even not as dense so on the other side there is some opportunity unique to the brands that we have right so so like on uber eats i don't know if you guys have done this or or thought about but like you know one of the problems let's say i wanted to order something and i wanted a pretzel or something and i wanted to ci bond or a job juice with it i can't do two orders right so you kinda need either the platform needs to enable you to say this end of that or you would have to list as a as that cluster it's like you can order from a menu and here's the menu because it's actually all one c located that's what we do yeah yeah right okay that's it's the easiest it's the lowest friction way to use the way the platform is structured without confusing the consumer so it shows up as an auntie location but right when you pull up the menu it says that's the problem is it's gotta have a lead location but because yeah because the brand shows up in the menu it does show up in the search so if you search ci but ci zach actually c branded with what was first and auntie ends you search ci it pops up it says auntie ends but then it shows you the menu item and so that's how we do it when we're c located today gotcha okay that make that makes sense so sort of a a little growth hack a little worker around to do that that's cool and i i was a different question so actually i'll talk about your idea i i like the food as pharmacy food as medicine i think that's the way the world is going you know somebody sent me this book i don't know if this book is real it's you know total fake science but there's sort of like this old book that's popular called each or blood type or something like that yeah yeah it's something like that but so i don't know if that that exact you know method is is is true but i think that there's definitely a at the very minimum you can see if somebody's deficient for certain things and you could recommend foods that will supplement right like so that's a that's a no brainer let alone you know what this book says is like hey if you're you know b blood type eat more red meat or whatever i don't know that's could just the anti inflammatory or the the the you know build your immune system yes diet or what you know what whatever it is when we've got very similar structures on our job but menu but that's a smoothie chain and it's not a whole end to end solution and it's still more fun for you wellness than like prescription right wellness and so how do you are you're the c coo and president of of all these food brands here obviously you have all these different locations and covid comes and covid you covid strikes and foot traffic dies and malls closed and you know who knows what's going on so walk us through what's it like to be in that executive chair when this is happening how does you approach it and then you know if you made any mistakes how do you do you look back and say we should have done this sooner or i should have i should treated you this a little differently so i'm curious how you did that and what you know what's that email you send out to the whole whole group i i'm just curious how how that goes you mean the emails everybody's sending me you know one thing i think it's just important for your listeners we that we always bring forward our full selves it just so have one we we have a lot of businesses in asia so we had a little bit of a heads up of what was happening gotcha and auntie incentive on are both in asia they're mostly in malls there as well so we had a sense of what that would be like for malls malls are only you know just over fifteen percent of our business at focus brands but it's a majority of the business for auntie ants okay and so benefit of having a diversified portfolio but very serious impact for one of the brands and then ci on to lesser degree because it's in more areas but still meaningfully in malls and airports and airports are just as impacted us as malls yep and and so i was in the hospital in the icu with my then seven month old daughter who had ivs feeding tubes because she had a horrible respiratory virus and i did as well we caught it from our toddler and it was just horrible wow and so here i am in a hospital while there's a nursing shortage because there were no tests and so basically if any doctors or nurses exhibited any symptoms they had to self quarantine right so there were doc i'm dealing with that and then you know working on my phone in the hospital with my mask on not sure if what i have is what she had because we hadn't they weren't hadn't identified it yet we finally identified it was something called meta which is one of the big bad seasonal viruses it was not covid but right as covid was hitting you know it was already big in seattle kinda coming west from the west across the united states and just a lot of alarm you know news coming out and very quickly the mall started shutting down right and it started in states that tend to be more progressive and then quickly moved to the rest of the country as more information was shared about how it spread and i was navigating the period that you just asked about with my child weak thin tubes in her nose we finally got out of icu this was mid march so really peak peak hitting us with right lack of knowledge coming home having all these conference calls with people from all over pulling my baby was pulling her feeding tube out of her nose shoving it back in her nose while i'm dealing with this so that my god ahead just the that reminder of we all have full lives even during these times so then what was it like in addition to that one her and her health you know her health was the most important thing to me so it kept everything else a bit more in perspective which was actually very healthy right then what i what i'm really proud of both for my leadership and my team and the whole company is that we got crystal clear on the few priorities we had which was one protect people right safety of our employees safety of our managers safety of our community like and whatever that meant if we were open that meant safety extra safety precautions beyond what food business already have to do it meant not asking people to travel or not having to go even before a lot of these companies started shutting down offices and before travel banned were put in place you know we were already going down that path safety number one so preserve health and well being the second priority is preserve cash because these businesses are small yep collectively they're quite large but independent franchise owned businesses i think jpmorgan or one of these banking financial institutions puts out a report every year that basically says the average independent retail operator operator including restaurants has like fourteen to twenty one days of cash on hand max and that is very typical of super small business owners and so we knew can't we had to preserve cash so keep everybody safe make sure there's nothing we're asking people to do or that that conflicts with that make sure that we're providing any safety precautions etcetera then help them preserve cash so put a pause on any royalties put a pause on any advertising fund make sure that we're negotiating with vendors to help franchisees not be stressed about their near term obligations while they are wondering what is going to happen so we just i mean it was so powerful having that clarity you know don't talk to me about anything unless it does one of those two things right keep people safe preserve cash and if it conflicts completes with either of those we're not gonna it and if it does both of those it moved to the top of the list right and that was it so we did that incredibly well every communication every email every department went to work i mean radical focus then we were thoughtful about the stages and the evolution because so we were amazing at responding to the crisis with heart and with mind but then things start to normalize and all a sudden the government starts to respond with yep help aid packages and every city had a different regulation and it was spaghetti mess of things for the owners franchisees to navigate and so then we went to work with every external resource our own lawyers our private equity firm just trying to consolidate guidance and information so that it also distressed them and allowed them to make informed decisions then ppp comes and all of these business owners are these small business owners are trying to figure out do they qualify should they apply do they need it if they do how do they get in line and and it was our job to just guide as much as we could right and and then as it normalized a bit putting systems in place that allowed them to open most of our all most of our malls are open and most of them are doing more sales than people would think mainly because not all the food providers are open and so yes it's a smaller pie of customers walking through and mall employees but we're getting a bigger share of that group which is great and in most cases the mall operators again this is a small portion of our total business but the mall operators are running on one shift and not two so in some cases short term they're able to preserve their livelihood and profitability because it's lower sales but more than people would think but running it off one shift so a bit in improved margins because of the labor ratios and the real question is what's the future you know which of these malls are going to get repurposed into something that doesn't make sense for a snack business which ones are gonna have a long slow painful exit so which ones are gonna close fast which ones are gonna be a slow road to go away and which ones actually because you then will have a redistribution of retail shopping even if it's less you know just like our example of food there are fewer places for them to go and in some communities malls or community centers it's not just a pace to get shoes and so i think that's gonna be really interesting to watch and so we're helping them navigate real estate negotiations you know what what how do you approach a all landlord with the elise do i just wait until it gets really bad and then i have more leverage do i try to renegotiate something now so i can plan my business what happens if it's a large mall developer versus an independent and so we've moved from crisis response and clarity to helping them navigate unbelievable amounts of information in an unprecedented time and way that many people were kind of reaching out to support government and local entities back to okay getting back to what is now our new normal they gotta start paying rent the stores are open bills are coming due some of our brands are doing better than last year's sale because they have drive thru and curb side and the benefits of the technological investments we made right so it the other discipline and where i think we we've been good but it's been a great lesson for me is to keep stepping back and asking are we exiting one chapter of crisis management and entering into another you don't wanna get stuck in a certain type of behavior too long yeah that is great i'm so glad you shared that i feel like this sort of you know there's a sort of a master class in how do you lead in you i don't know if we recall it crisis but i think this one way to put it but just in in general in in a time of a lot of change and lack of information and so you have to be like highly adaptable and then you have to be responsible and through humane and all you know all the different things you wanna be and you're never gonna be perfect at it but i thought you kinda walked everyone through it very well crisis this is my jam yeah stressful how do you deal with that that's that's crazy i'm like i try to have such an easier life than the life you live that is my goal is to have like the opposite of that situation which is like how do i how do i have the minimal amount of sort of stress and the maximum amount of you know fun and impact that's like well i think because i used to think i wanna run a big company and we my company got bought we got acquired and so now you know twitch is a two thousand person company and i see what the executive life is every day and they're great at it and i think they thrive on it but i'm looking at them i'm like wait that's what i would get promoted to like that's that's a trap for me i don't i don't want that i'm i'm not i don't know if i'm not built for that it's definitely not what i would want but it's kind of cool to see different people who you need people who are gonna do that otherwise who's gonna run these system for sure so you're one of those one of those special people and i admire that about you cool alright well thank you for coming on i we should we should wrap it up i i promise you an hour you know you're welcome to come on anytime you would like i i i think you you should be what i call you know a friend of the show oh awesome i would love to seriously if if you got like random topics you wanna jam on i'm so i love you know spider webbing into different industries my husband's in dc i've been a part of the startup up world for quite some time through angel investing and mentoring i love jamming on brand you know talking about brands and how to build brands and what does it really mean and and just the human side it sounds like you really are into the psychological filter of the world not in a manipulative way in an understanding way and they're using it as a resource way and i am too so we'd love to geek out on those topics with you anytime alright on and where should people will find you so is twitter the best way to connect well what's the best yeah twitter i'm one of the growing number of people that have a sub stack so you can go on and find my newsletter checking in just sharing leadership lessons but twitter linkedin instagram all the places i'm not hard to find okay so it's kat cole at t on twitter that's why i follow you yep because you're not like corporate drone just saying basic things you talk like a human and you say funny things all the time so so i i enjoy you're good you're a good follow i i highly recommend the same about you okay cool alright thanks for coming on i gotta go i gotta go nowhere i sit here and click the next zoom thing and i do the next zoom thing which is the weird the weird world we live now off that nice to nice to actually finally let meet you yeah you too