by Herman Cain
Several weeks later, I received a description of the fast track program in writing, along with an offer to join the Burger King Corporation. I assured Gloria that we would not starve if things did not work out there because I was not too proud to work any job I had to in order to take care of her and our children.
But if this move to Burger King did work out, who knew where it could lead? Once again, the possibility of success was motivating me more than the fear of failure.
In deciding whether to leave my comfortable corporate VP job at Pillsbury to start over at Burger King, I asked myself one question, the right question: Will this put me in a better position to become president of a business? I did not ask myself the wrong questions: How hard will my new job be? What will my friends think if they see me making hamburgers in a quick-service restaurant? What will I do if this new position does not work out as planned? As a CEO of Self, I knew that those questions were not the right ones to be asking. I focused on my dream and I accepted the offer to join the company’s fast track program, with no guarantees.
The people I worked with at Pillsbury gave me a farewell reception in a large activities room near my office. During the party, my secretary came over to me and said there was an urgent telephone call for me. My brother, Thurman, was on the line. “Dad just passed away,” he said.
While we had been expecting that sad news, the finality of it was very real. I just sat there for a few minutes and prayed. Then I collected myself and returned to the reception. I knew that was what Dad would have wanted me to do.
I’ve always had a philosophy whenever I’ve changed jobs or careers: Never look back, no matter how hard it gets. So on the day I left Pillsbury for the last time, I never looked back. I knew that there had been a message for me in Dad’s having passed during my farewell party: I had to succeed. I was motivated to do so.
I began my career at Burger King by reporting to the Bloomington training restaurant in the Minneapolis region, where I was issued a crew uniform, a set of operations manuals, a training manual, and my schedule for the week.
I started my fast track training at the back of the place, where I was responsible for putting buns and patties through the broiler. Assignment to one’s next position would be based on developing some proficiency, and before the end of that first day, I was assigned to the front of the broiler, to learn the steamer position, and I was off and running.
I would eventually progress through all the positions in the restaurant. After spending a few weeks in the “back of the house,” learning the broiler, steamer, burger board, whopper board, specialty sandwich board, and fry station, I moved to the “front of the house,” working the positions of cashier, expediter, drive-through order taker, runner-bagger, and drink station operator.
Not long afterward, I spent a week of classroom operations instruction at the regional training center for assistant managers. Then, following more restaurant practice and classroom training, I went to Miami for ten days of study at Burger King University, a structured training center at the company’s headquarters.
Burger King University was very well organized and very well run. There were sixty to seventy people in a class, from all over the country. Burger King had ten regions, and each one would send some of their assistant managers.
I was the only former corporate vice president in the class; all the rest of them were either college graduates entering the restaurant industry or people who had started out working in a restaurant and worked their way up to an assistant manager’s position. Most of them just wondered: Why is he here?
The training program was very structured and very good, and it reinforced some of the basic information we were supposed to have known before we got there. But it was also designed to drive us a little further, to give us more of a restaurant manager’s training, because the main reason we were going was that we were all assistant managers aspiring to be managers or managers aspiring to be district managers.
We went to class literally all day, for five straight days, in a very intensive training environment. We’d have lectures, homework assignments, in-class exercises, exams, and tests, as well as guest speakers. I tried to befriend those guys. And I did, especially when we got into that management stuff, because I’d already been a vice president of a corporation and already knew some of those management principles. So I actually mentored them a bit—at least the ones who wanted to listen.
I enjoyed it because my focus was always on where I was trying to get to, never on where I had been: I wanted to be a vice president and regional general manager of Burger King and I needed to go to Burger King University. I never worried that I would have to make hamburgers and fries. I didn’t care about that, as long as they thought that was necessary for me to get to where I wanted to go. And I never regretted switching companies.
Once I had successfully completed my in-restaurant and classroom training, I was assigned to the Hopkins, Minnesota, unit as fourth assistant manager. At the age of thirty-six, I was that “old dude”—the subject of speculation by the managers and assistants as to why I was being fast tracked to become a regional vice president.
My first test of fire came when a usually dependable young Asian man working the steamer position during the busy lunch period accidentally tangled his foot in the flexible gas hose connected to the broiler.
No one noticed at first that the gas to the broiler had been cut off. Then Mary Pat, who was working the burger board, called me in from the front of the restaurant to report that the patties were coming out undercooked. When I went back there to adjust the broiler, I discovered that the dozens of patties coming out of the broiler had not been cooked at all.
I realized that it would take at least fifteen minutes to get the broiler back up to cooking temperature. The lines at the counter were backed up to the front door; the cars in the drive-through lane were wrapped all the way around the restaurant and into the street. We had no burgers at Burger King!
A situation like that had never arisen in the classroom training. I decided on the spot that two things would be required of me: leadership and a common sense approach to dealing with the problem. So, after asking Mary Pat to restart the broiler, I told the person handling the specialty sandwiches station to make as many chicken and fish sandwiches as fast as the operations manual would allow. Then I told the beverages person to start pouring out soft drinks in all sizes and all flavors as fast as the machine would go. And then I said to the fry station person: “Keep dropping fries until I tell you to stop.”
After issuing these orders, I went to the front of the restaurant and informed the customers that it would be fifteen minutes before we would again be serving burgers and Whoppers. Then I went outside, going from car to car to explain the situation. By the time the broiler was up and running, we had sold out of the chicken and fish sandwiches.
I had made it through my first crisis.
When I was appointed as manager of my first Burger King restaurant and asked the regional manager to explain his expectations, he said: “Just increase the sales and the profits.” At that time, the end-of-year sales projection for that restaurant was $800,000. When I asked my boss if I could change any of the menu prices, he said, “No.” When I asked if I could spend some discretionary marketing dollars, he responded, “No.” And when I requested permission to eliminate the Parmesan sand-wich—we sold only two a month—he once again said “No.”
So as I took charge of the restaurant, I considered the one thing he could not put into a “you cannot do that” category: changing the attitude of all of my employees. I noticed that many of my cashiers were not smiling. At Burger King University we had been advised to tell the cashiers to smile because then the customers would smile and come back. So I established the BEAMER program, which taught our employees, mostly teenagers, how to make our patrons smile.
Within three months of the program’s initiation, the sales trend was moving steadily higher, and the district manager raised his sales
projection to upward of one million dollars—and I still had that Parmesan sandwich on the menu!
The BEAMER program had a simple but effective premise—look people in the eye and smile, and they will smile back, and it was a huge success. One day, at the end of a lunch shift, a lady who was sitting at a table where she could observe the entire front counter area asked me, “Are you the manager?”
I assumed she had a complaint, because you usually don’t expect customers to stop you to say something is good. But she asked, “How do you get so many happy people at the front counter?” I smiled and thought to myself, “Yes, it's working!”
I did very well at the fast track program, but my transition from vice president at Pillsbury to Burger King regional manager was not as smooth. Not only did I have to deal with resentment and sabotage, but also with a conspiracy to get me fired!
The resentment stemmed from the fact that as a former vice president with the parent company, Pillsbury, it was thought that I would deny a Burger King veteran one of the much-sought-after regional manager positions.
The sabotage occurred in the Minneapolis region when I’d been the manager of a particular restaurant for only a month or so. One night I was working the evening shift, which meant that I had to close down the restaurant at 11:00 P.M. That involved taking the daily inventory, cleaning and sanitizing the equipment, and cleaning the restaurant in preparation for the next day. In addition, as the closing manager, I had to count out and balance the cash receipts with the recorded register receipts and deposit the money in the bank, keeping enough cash on hand to start business the next day.
That night my cash count came up fifty dollars short of my register receipts. I stayed up all night counting and recounting, trying to discover what was wrong. Had I done something wrong? Or were the record tapes incorrect? It was driving me nuts!
Finally, when the opening manager for the next day arrived I gave up and listed the shortage on my daily report. And when I closed the following night, the cash was fifty dollars over, which I also included in my report.
It was only during my last week as manager of that restaurant that I learned what had happened: I had been set up in a sting designed to shake me up and to see whether I would operate strictly according to procedure. The assistant manager had removed and then replaced the fifty dollars.
After confessing and apologizing to me for what he had done, the assistant manager explained that it was common knowledge around Burger King that the regional manager wanted me to fail. I accepted the assistant manager’s apology. He had come to respect me and to admire my sincerity when dealing with people. We remain friends to this day.
Within three months of my becoming a first-time restaurant manager, sales increased by 20 percent. Then, after completing nine months of the usual eighteen-month fast track program, I was pulled out and made regional vice president (RVP) of the Philadelphia Region. After a year and a half as RVP, and despite my region exceeding its performance goals, a conspiracy to get me fired was hatched in the company’s corporate headquarters. The conspiracy failed.
The reason I did so well in running Burger King’s Philadelphia region is that I treated people like people and the culture at Burger King was intimidation, fear, and screaming, tactics to which I do not subscribe. I believe in telling people when they’re doing something right.
After my reassignment to Philadelphia, my new boss, Bill DeLeat, a true CEO of Self, paid my region a visit and spent three days intensively examining its operations. He then told me it was one of the best, if not the best-performing region in the country.
In retrospect, the unexpected obstacles I encountered at Burger King may have been a blessing in disguise. Had I anticipated them up front, I might have lost sight of my dream. Instead, I focused on the problems as they came to light. That’s what CEOs do all the time: solve problems so that they can move on—and stay focused.
In 1986, four years after having taken over Burger King’s Philadelphia Region, I was attending an RVP meeting in San Francisco when I had a telephone call from Jeff Campbell, the executive in charge of Pillsbury’s restaurant companies—in other words, the boss of my boss’s boss.
Jeff asked me to meet him in Miami. He wanted to discuss the possibility of my taking over Godfather’s Pizza, Inc., a company that Pillsbury had recently acquired.
5
The Godfather’s Years: From Ceo to entrepreneur
But without faith it is impossible to please Him: for he that cometh to God must believe that He is; and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.
—Hebrews 11:6
That fateful call from Jeff Campbell, made from the company’s headquarters in Miami, Florida, would lead to my achieving my wildest dream: becoming president of something.
What Jeff Campbell didn’t say when he called me from Miami was that Godfather’s was on the verge of bankruptcy. It had been acquired by Pillsbury in 1985 as part of its agreement to purchase Diversifoods, Inc. To acquire the nearly three hundred Burger King units owned and operated at that time by Diversifoods, Pillsbury had to include Godfather’s in that deal.
I had never been to Omaha before, or to Nebraska, for that matter. On April 1, my first day on my new job, the initial item on my agenda was to meet with Jan, my new executive assistant, and with Ron Gartlan, Godfather’s executive vice president of corporate support.
The next thing on my schedule that day was to attend an orientation meeting. While waiting for it to get underway, I wandered into the employees’ lunch area. A young lady was sitting there and we began to chat.
“Are you new here?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Herman Cain and this is my first day.”
“I’m Lori Williams and I work in accounts receivable,” she informed me. “What will you be doing here?”
“I’m the new president of the company,” I replied.
“I’ve heard every line in the book, but this is a new one,” she said. “You’re the president of the company? Get out of here. Who are you trying to kid?”
We both laughed and then she said she had to get back to work. When Pillsbury announced that I was the new president, they did not include a picture of me.
Later that afternoon, Ron Gartlan called an employees’ meeting to introduce me to everyone working in the corporate office. As I began to speak, I noticed that somebody sitting in the back of the room was hiding behind the person sitting in front of her, trying not to be seen. I leaned to one side to get a better look. There sat Lori Williams, so I said, “Hi, Lori.”
Everybody was surprised at my greeting her by name. After all, it was the first staff meeting of my first day at work, so how could I already know her? And when I described how we had just met in the lunchroom, everybody, except for Lori, thought the story was hilarious. She eventually came round and it was a good ice breaker. I guess that Lori, along with everybody else, realized that her new boss had a sense of humor.
I then spoke about my background, career, and business philosophy, stressing that I was not coming to Godfather’s with answers to all the company’s problems. Rather, my job would be to help formulate and then implement a plan of action. And I made it clear that I would not have come to Godfather’s unless I had been convinced that the company could once again be successful.
Introductions accomplished, it was time for me to get to work. I knew as I did so that in order to reboot Godfather’s, I would have to muster all my analytical skills; apply my philosophy of “exceeding the expectation of the job”; and, according to my overriding principle, “Focus, focus, focus.”
My efforts, against all odds, to bring the company back to profitability bore fruit within eighteen months. But first I had to readjust my sights. It’s one thing to want to be the president of a large enterprise, but it’s another thing to get to be one. And it’s quite another thing to actually arrive at your new office, sit at your desk, and be that president. In my particular case, taking over Godfather’s wa
s especially challenging, given the company’s negative growth and declining sales.
I followed that first staff meeting with a one-on-one with my predecessor. I was taken aback when he neglected to talk about “QSC”—quality, service, and cleanliness—based on my experience at Burger King, the three requirements that are the heart of the restaurant business.
If an operation is not consistent in QSC, the question is not if you will go out of business, but when. My predecessor’s failure to speak of QSC during our discussion was my first indication that the “right questions” had never been asked. And, likely, that the right problems had not been identified.
That evening, after a long and exciting day, I had dinner with Ron Gartlan. Having been with the company since 1982, he had witnessed just about everything that had happened at Godfather’s since then, including the parade of four presidents who had only briefly “touched down” within three years.
Our conversation was direct and open. In response to one of my questions, Ron said, “I don’t know if you are going to keep me around, but I’m going to tell you the truth anyway.” I knew instinctively that he was extremely trustworthy—a person I would keep on my team. And my instinct was right: Ron proved to be thoughtful, analytical, responsive, and, most important, brutally honest.
The rest of my first week at Godfather’s was taken up with one-on-one meetings with the company’s top twenty executives in as many hours; visits to several of our Omaha-area restaurants; and conversations with local franchisees. While some of them were courteous, friendly, and constructive with their feedback about what needed to be done, others were downright rude and hostile.