Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learnings so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. You know, leadership looks differently for everybody when you really consider all the various industries and backgrounds and personalities that are out there. But no matter what, there's one thing every leader has in common. And it's this, you gotta deliver results. So I'm excited to be sitting down today with one of the most results driven leaders I know. And that's all in Lewis. He's the former chairman and CEO of Pop Belly Sandwich Works and the former CEO of Sears Holdings. He also served as the chief operating officer at Young Brands when I was the CEO there. And let me tell you, he and I shared some really wonderful moments collaborating together. If you want to see what it looks like to deliver big results while also keeping culture and people at the heart of how you lead, well, I can't think of a better person for you to learn from. All one truly is one of the best leaders I've ever worked with. And if you keep listening, you're gonna understand why. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to the years, all one Lewis . All one, thanks so much for being on the show. I'm really looking forward to this. David, it's a real honor. You know what? You've met to me in my career. So it's real honored to be asked to do this conversation with you. You know, all one, you truly are one of the best leaders I've ever worked with. And I can't wait to get into how you lead. But first, tell me a story about your upbringing that shaped the way you lead. I'm the product of Albert and Eddie Lewis, my mom and dad. And you know, we grew up poor, first 10 years in the project. But one day I came home and told my mom I found a shortcut way to go to school. And she sat me down and said, listen, there are no shortcuts in life. I want you to always take the straight and narrow and always do the right thing . And that's just kind of the conversations as a mom she had with us. Be independent, education is the way out, and always do your best work. But that no shortcut really resonated with me. Yeah, I remember you talking about your mom and how much you admired and loved her. As a young black man starting your career in the 70s, how do you compare your opportunity that you had to what your father faced? My worst day was the best day he ever had. He was a man who got up at five o'clock every day, was out the door at five thirty, always pressed and polished. Such a great example of working, worked three jobs to provide for the family. And so I never wanted to do anything to dishonor him or my mom. And my career was a dedication to what they meant to me and trying to demonstrate what was possible in his bloodline. So he was very influential. There wasn't a day that I didn't go to work without thinking about him and his generation. You know, I remember you talking to me and you had this amazing phrase and you said, as a minority, you need to figure out how to hold on to who you are and fit in with the majority. And I'll never forget that all. And would you mind sharing a story of how you did that? Well, again, when your frame of reference is, I'm like the first generation to break out and to be able to have college education, to be able to work in management for a large organization, to manage a business. And so the goal was then to say, how do I be true to myself? Understand the heritage. But then be open so people be willing to help you. And the key to that was my father said, listen, you can go through this thing called life as a black man in America. You can be angry. You can be resentful. Or you can do it with a lot of pride and a lot of love and allow people to help you by being open, by demonstrating your worth the effort for them to invest in you . And so that was the way for me. How do you work on the inside? You're no one's fool. You're very prideful. But you're not angry and you're open. Bill Russell once said, if you build a wall around yourself, you're leaving more out than you're putting in. And so my goal was to demonstrate that I was worthy of the effort. I was worthy of someone like you coming in KFC when you came in as the president. I was one of six and being able to demonstrate, hey, I'm someone that you can trust. I'm someone who's all about results. I'm someone that you can partner with. And I remember you met with me in Chicago in my office and said, I have few blood brothers in this life and you can be one of those. And we kind of made a pact that day to take care of each other. It was that type of thing that allowed my career to happen. That's a great story. I'm going to come back to that a little bit later. And I also remember you telling me that your dad actually told you you needed to get a haircut if you wanted to get ahead. So the story was I got a call. I was a district manager, jacket, a box, great results. And the financial guy from Dallas, the division called me up and said, the reason I've missed out on three promotions. He called me up. His name was Chris. Chris called me up and said, I want to tell you something on the QT. The reason that you have not been promoted is that your Afro is too large. And he said, if you ever tell anybody, I told you this, I'll deny it, but your Afro is too large. I went to my father that's thousand a Friday. I went to my father and sat it and said, can you believe this? They're telling me I'm not getting promoted because I have an Afro. And he said, look me in the face and says, the barber is right down the street. I love that. So what? Listen, you couldn't go wrong with parents and values like that. I'm feeling sorry for myself. And he's like, listen, if it takes to cut your hair to get promoted, the barber is right down the street. So I went down the street that day and got a haircut within a few months I was promoted. You go to college and you graduate with college and start out working at Jack in the box. It's a restaurant manager. What did that teach you about leadership? Everything. That was the foundation. One, serving customers was very exciting, having the privilege of being a young man at 23 and running a million dollar restaurant, that awesome responsibility. But the thing that really taught me was how you can get a group of people that are from an underrepresented part of society and help them reach their American dream. And it was just so the teamwork, having them understand how to run a business, understanding a hierarchy in the restaurant, understanding it's a social environment, understanding you need values as a foundation because if you have that, that will allow you to pick people to share your attitude about your mission and about your work, the whole thing of putting a plan together and using that plan to run the business so you're not victimized by the business. I was restaurant manager for 18 months, but those things I did, those 18 months was foundational for my whole career. And getting it done through people and because of people, I think was the key foundation. When you start talking about the restaurant business, you just, you light up. You know, you really light up. What is it about that business that really gave you the most joy? Putting a group of people together to have success as a team. I mean, when you walk into that environment and you see a well-run restaurant and people know their place because they're well-trained, they're taking care of customer, they have speed, they're putting out super high quality product and then doing it at a rhythm and a pace and a joy, it's just a thing of beauty. It's absolutely, it's like going to a great concert and watching musicians play and the fact that you can get people from different backgrounds, bring them in that environment, have them be committed to great service and great quality. I just love it. You know, I was a graduate student working on my PhD when I started to work for Jack in the box. I was just going to do that as a summer job to make money. And a week into it, I'm like, "Wow, this is really different. This is really satisfying." And so that getting people together to serve customers and serve great food, that became a passion and I loved everything about it. You're going to learn from this conversation that I remember a lot of things that you talk to be about. And you know, you are a very results oriented guy, no question about it. And you talk to me about how you couldn't hide from the profit and loss statement and the power it gives you to really separate yourself. Talk about that. I'm a manager for the first time. I'm really running a country club for about the first six weeks. I'm doing tasks for everybody. I'm their friends. I'm a bleeding heart liberal. I'm just trying to please everybody. So my district manager comes in and shows me a P&L for the first time. And he's like, "We're losing money. Your food cost is 5% over. Your labor cost is 5% over. Your mine is 15 in the hole from your profit and loss." That was startling to me. And then he's like, "You know, you got people stealing from you and they're taking advantage of you." And that just shook up. It's like, "This is not fun. It can be in a durable environment, but we're here for a reason and we're here to make money." And so that created this whole sense of how do you make money the right way through people and do it in a way that you can teach people because you need help, but you can 't run away from results. And the results are the currency you use to say, "I deserve to be promoted. I deserve that raise. I deserve to come back to work the next day." Without results, nothing's possible. We're not running a nonprofit business. Those are important. But the frame of our business is how do I make money so I can afford to reinvest, so I can afford to hire more people. So I can afford to have resources so I can do service well and maintenance well . And so that was a very important lesson after those first six weeks of saying, "Oh, I'm everybody's friend. I'm running a country club." Oh, no, we got to have standards. We got to have procedures because we need to make money. And then coming to work for Jack in the Box in Pepsi code, those organizations that if you didn't make plan, you were not going to be around. So the notion of how do you make money, do it the right way, but do it over and over again became very important. You can do it by accident once. But my goal was always out of a 13-period year, can we blow away plan 12 out of 13 so we can have an excellent year? You're always going to have one that's kind of unexpected. You mentioned it. I met you for the first time in Chicago. You were regional vice president there. You were working at KFC. And I saw you give this rousing speech to our restaurant journal managers. And you are a tremendous speaker, one of the best I've ever seen. What advice can you give other leaders on how to frame a talk that will really fire up the troops? You're so important in my career. I used to go on and on and on. And you're the guy who said, "Listen, leave them one anymore." And so what I will tell you, I write out an outline. I frame it around themes I want to have. And if someone said you have 30 minutes to give the speech, I shoot now for 22 minutes. I don't need to say everything that's on my mind. I need to say what's important. You understand the crowd and you be prepared. And well, I always like to give the appearance that I could do it off the cuff. I spend a ton of time practicing. You're driving, you're practicing, you're practicing. I don't write out the speech because I used to try to memorize things. And the minute you lost that you didn't remember one word in sequence, it would throw you off. So then it's like, here's my outline. You look for someone facing the crowd and you talk to that face and you have a conversation. That's what people are looking for. They're looking to say, "Can you be frank? Can you be honest? Can you be authentic?" Is the message you're trying to give to me a message that I need? If I know anything about the speaker, does your work and does your values represent what you're trying to tell me? The power of what you taught me was when you cascade things two levels down and you're talking to folks, if you don't have integrity, you can't have credibility to talk about integrity in front of people if you don't actually walk to talk is the phrase you always use. So I think speaking is important, communication is important, practice, practice, practice, are not lying together, be as brief as possible, and then have a conversation. As you well know, restaurant turnover in the business is often over 200%. And yet you were one of the best in the industry, certainly the best that young brands ever had in terms of reducing turnover. First of all, for the people who don't know the business, tell us what 200% turnover means and then how did you reduce it many times under 100%, 80% if I recall? 200% turnover means people are not trained, means you're not going to have great service, you can't have excellence because there's such turmoil. So all the things you look for and say, "Can I build a team? Can I get that team to be excellent? Can I get that team to understand my values? Can I understand the priorities?" A management 200 turnover said, "Listen, I'm not going to do training until the first 30 days that I know you're going to stay here." And those first 30 days is when you learn everything about the business, so you can never go back. What got me on the turnover, the low turnover path is when I became CO or Pizza Hut, I went out and spent time with a guy named McCarthy at Marriott. He was a CO or Marriott, and at the time they had 50% turnover with their maids . And I went out, "CO or Pizza, I can go out and get a meeting with anyone." And he gave me the book. It was probably a two-hour meeting, and it turned out to an eight-hour meeting. But the biggest thing he said was, "First, you only hire people that share your values." And low turnover starts with who you hire. So hire hard and you manage easy. And you got to give your managers to room to be patient with hiring the right people. And that is the secret. And as you know, we got it down to like 85% at Pizza Hut when we came to Yum overall. Got it down to 85 to 80%. The great days at Pot Billie, one reason that was such a strong operation, we had 50% turnover as an organization. With 50% 80% turnover, you can demonstrate the difference between profit at 80% and the difference at 200%. It's almost double. I remember when I went out at CO, at the Taco Bell franchise meeting, and at the time they were like 150. And they were very proud because they were high-volume organization. And I said, "You know, we really need to get turnover down to 80%. And they were polite, but you can see they were laughing." And then when I put up the chart that said, "At 80% here's your profit and at 200 and 150% here's your profit." And the difference was $100,000. Well, they didn't laugh. Then it became, "Okay, how do you do it?" And again, selection is the key. Orientation is the key. And 200% turnover means you basically turn over your team twice, you know, in the course of the year, right? Yes. Higher uniform costs, higher training costs, all those ancillary things, just eat up your profit. And you're not going to get the same amount of time, and your managers cannot get stability in the restaurant. You know, I remember when you were the chief operating officer at Yum, we had this customer program called Last. And then you really thought about it and you changed it to Blast. Now Last meant listen, act, satisfy, and think. And you made it Blast. And the B was to start by believing that the customer had positive intentions. The point of that was you would have customers come in with complaints and we wouldn't believe them. They would have to bring me to receipt, bring me, it did, but then the conversation to French as he said, understand when you do that, the message you're sending is, and you know you're going to make mistakes. So let's believe the customer's telling us the truth. Back in that day, 90% of customers were telling you the truth. You don't put a program in place for the 2% knuckleheads. And if you're solving the customer problem and empowering the employee at the point of contact to solve the problem, you can demonstrate to people that's a small cost . And you're getting a customer for life because so many customers are not believed in our business. And it's a point of difference. It's a way to grow sales and to be a loyalty was the point. Oh, and how'd you go about spending time understanding the needs of the front line in our customers? Well, I had good demonstration. One, you know, I did a lot of blind visits, which meant you go out incognito to see the business in a real basis. And there you get, you just understand what's really going on as opposed to when you go and people know you're coming. So the blind visits were important. But then a lot of roundtable, David's, as you know, where you would go in and you're going to market and you meet with, you know, 10 shift leaders. You meet with 15 assistant managers. You meet with managers. And I'd ask basically three questions. You know, why do you work here? What do you like about working here? And what do you don't like working here? And with those three questions, you could just learn a lot. If it was an hour and 20 minute meeting, I would spend an hour just listening. And then at the end, you would answer questions and you would correct misconceptions that people had. And then the last thing I would ask is say, okay, you go back to your restaurant. What are you going to tell them about this meeting? What are you going to tell them you got out of this? And then I would take those notes back and share that with the team. And there are always some nuggets there that we could do better. That question of what would you do better? In fact, I would ask if you had my job for a week, what are the three things you would change? And you just get power out of that. When you visited restaurants, I made it a point and you did this too. You go and you speak to everybody on the floor. You shake their hands. You look them in the eye. You say, thank you. If you want to know what's going on in a KFC restaurant, go back and you have a conversation with the cook. If you want to know about food quality. If you want to know about service, talk to the shift leader. I consider myself a person or the people because that's where I came. That's my orientation, the frontline orientation. The reason you and I were such good partners that we had this common person, we wanted the company to work for the frontline. And we set the whole thing up for the general managers, our number one leader, because they manage the frontline. They have cash registers and they serve as our customers. And when that's your orientation, then you have to demonstrate that by listening to the frontline. And then we did the culture surveys every year. And out of that gave you a lot of information on what you should be doing better. It was always not satisfied where you are with satisfying the frontline and ensuring that those environments were positive for them as you could possibly make them. Hey everyone, it's Kula, co-host of Three More Questions. And I have some exciting news to share with you. We just launched a breakthrough app that will help you become a better leader in less than two minutes a day. It's called How Leaders Lead. As you know on the podcast, David spends about an hour each week interviewing some of the top leaders in the world. People like Tom Brady, Condolee is a rice and Jamie Diamond. But we know that leaders like yourself are pressed for time. So we've taken the very best clips from these conversations and put them into an easy to use mobile app that you can learn from in less than two minutes a day. If you want to become a better leader, start a daily leadership habit with the How Leaders Lead app. It's available now for free in the App Store. Download it today. You are known for being an outstanding coach. Tell us a story about how you helped someone see a blind spot they may have had . I'm a COO pizza hut. I'm out in the West Coast working with, and we called everybody coaches back then. I'm working with a VP of Ops running the West. And this person, he was MBA from Chicago, PNG as his first job. He was a marketer that was trying to be an operator. And what he was always trying to do is elevate the job of the person versus concentrating on operations. And it was a real blind spot because he would go in and talk to the leader and make them feel great. But he left out why he wanted them to be great. He didn't talk about results at all. Didn't talk about frontline at all. Didn't talk about service at all. It was always just talking about the person and why he wanted them on the team. And so we were in his car driving down ITN in LA and I said, "You may not make it in this role." If you continue to only focus on your top leaders and not focus on results, not focus on the frontline, not focus on the culture, you won't be here in six months. And it shocked him tremendously. I got pedigree. I got an MBA from this and this. It's like, "Yeah, but the results out here should be awesome. This should be our best results, but you are not driving results because you're only talking to the leader and telling them why they're so great." And so I think the person thought about it, we know the person and turned around to be one of our best divisions and profit grew, sales grew. Coaching to me is individualized perception. How do I assess the situation? How do I assess the person and then provide the coaching that's very specific? There's group coaching you need to do. But when you're coaching specific team leaders, you need to come with the facts and understand their situation so you provide the coaching that's really needed. And sometimes we all need to have a two by four. You don't kind of hit us over the head so we really get jarred into really changing and that work and that particular situation. It wasn't a lot, but there are times you had to do a two by four to me too. I want to ask you about that. Oh, when you were a CEO in the restaurant business, CEO in the retail business, you've been on boards from Disney to Marriott to Voya. What do you think it takes to be a great operating officer in any business that you may be in? David, I think first is a real understanding of the culture. Culture is very important. I probably should have led with that. The thing that you brought to us at KFC, Pizza Hut and Yum was how important culture is, that you can teach culture and you want to make culture personal. You want to make it an invitation. And you lead by example and you're public as a leader about the values and how you want to lead the values. The I will statements were very important because then you have no room to move but to do it. The walk to talk becomes very important. If you're going to be an operational leader in any business, you've got to use the culture. You've got to represent the culture. You've got to lead with the culture. That's very important. Then you have to understand the business and put processes and tools in place where distributed population can be excellent. For me, that was the balance scorecard that we developed and use tools to help teach it. You've got to play book together so as a general manager, here's your playbook on how you can be excellent. If you never see your boss, this playbook will allow you to be excellent on the things that we say that matter. If you happen to have a boss that comes around and coach you, that's a lucky strike extra. Then put a system in place that says, "I want the majority of my stores to win ." We used to rack and stack. The only person who would win at the end of the year was number one, where everybody physically can't be number one. Everyone can be a contributor where there's a safety zone. You're not looking up. You're not looking sideways. I'm delivering the right results. I'm making plan. Once you can get that, then people understand how to win, why they want to win, how I get to team organized the goals. It's process and discipline. It's how you win. It's scorecard. It's understanding the business. It's teaching the business. It's all pulled together because of the culture. Without culture, greatness in operations, greatness in business is not possible . As a leader, I know you always looked at yourself and kept polishing the apple and trying to get better and better. When did you first have that deep down belief that you could become a CEO? Meeting people like you? You'd realize how easy it was. The thing that you brought to me as one of my key mentors in my career was you forced me to bring my whole self to work. You forced me to trust the people that I worked with, peers and leaders above you. By using the culture, you're like, "Well, take your wall down." I literally would have a compartmentalized work and who I was. By then saying, "Bring your whole self to work." Then you're not running two books and then you can spend the time to really become great. Once you get to the C-suite, it's all about teamwork, trustworthiness and the no-look paths. It's completing each other's sentences. The enterprise becomes the key. Yes, you have a functional team and you're accountable for that functional result. You become part of understanding how does the mothership reach its potential. The enterprise view becomes the thing. Without that enterprise view, you cannot become part of C-suite and you definitely won't become a CEO. I used to call it the three circles and how I look at businesses like Godwers. You have the obstacle, you have a finance circle, you have a marketing circle. I say, "You have to be an expert in one of those. You have to have high competency and a second one and then you have to have high curiosity in the third." So much about, and you said a lot, you've never seen a great leader that wasn't curious. I've never been around greatness that wasn't always trying to understand more about their world, their situation and the world in general. They can have a different point of view on stuff, but they were always curious. When you find leaders that are self-contained, that are self-important, that are a finished product, then you're looking for someone who's going to be not successful in the long term. You left Yum to become the CEO of Kmart and then Sears. Both those brands have had a very troubled past, left in the dust by competitors like Walmart. What gave you the confidence to go to these troubled brands? I was in a great spot. I was four years working for you. We had a great team at Yum. We were accomplishing really great things. I think those four years, we hit our quarterly numbers. As the ops person, I could go around the globe and provide goodwill. But I wanted to be a CEO. That never was going to happen at Yum. Nobody's going to move you out to put me in. I could never compete against a family. You would get calls. I never took those calls because I wasn't going to compete against Yum brands. That left out the whole industry that I knew. When I got the opportunity to go to Kmart, it was a $20 billion business, $1 billion at Ibadah out of bankruptcy, a fighter brand. I thought I could do things there. I never knew it was going to be a merger with Sears. I would not have went because Sears was a dinosaur. From three weeks in, I can't come back to Yum. Guy calls up and says, "We got to buy Sears." I made the best of it. What I would say, you look at those three years, it was a $53 billion company. We averaged $3 billion a year in Ibadah that hadn't happened before, that hasn 't happened after. Those three years were very important. But eventually it became untenable because strategically, there was no reason to have a general store that was mall based that was competing against great competition that was specialized. You had Lowe's and Home Depot and hardware. You had all the fashion chains and the soft lines. Then we were mall based general store. There was no reason. The person who hired me who owned 70% of the company, I said, "Instead of merging with Sears, you should have taken a flight up to Seattle and see if you could have merged one of these businesses with Amazon when they were still small. That would have made more sense." But putting these two failed brands together, they're not wanting to do the work, the reinvestment that was going to take. We spent a ton of money buying back stock and didn't take care of the store. I'm proud of the work. Learned a different business. Changed out 75% of the managers. Really focused on the culture. The best year there, the second year there, we made $3.6 billion. A lot of learning, but very difficult. Essentially, I didn't want to compete against the family. I wanted to be a CEO and got an opportunity to do that. When you got there, Alwyn, how did you go about learning what most would say was a vastly different industry and retail merchandising, which is an art? A hundred days. My hundred day plan submerged in the business. First it came out. Then when we announced the merger with Sears, doing a deep dive of finding the best and breed processes and the best and breed people. I went on a hundred day mission to learn the business. There were some similarities with operations in the stores and how those should run. Culture, people. That was all transferable. The toughest part was this merchant class that they have in retail that makes no sense. They highlight these merchants and all they do is product design, product marketing and product development. But they have their own P&L, they have their own math. They elevate these folks to a level. That was probably the biggest challenge. I was fortunate two and a half those years. I had two really good chief merchants. It came out one of Sears that were able to work together and do some things. I had two great store guys that I still talk to today. Then we had fairly decent marketing. The biggest thing, David, is that when you're trying to turn around companies who have failed, the vision and the alignment just has to be so, so tight. Even then, the odds are against you. When it's not tight, and me and Eddie, who was a chairman and owned 70% of the company, there was just not a tight enough alignment around what need to be done and how you need it to be done. He didn't believe in long-term plans. He didn't believe in budgeting. All the stuff that drives businesses, he didn't believe in giving down your raises. You have to start in September building the case on why we should give our people raises. After three and a half years of that environment, you just wake up one day and say, "I may not can make it here." You can be a great jockey, but if the horse is not great, you ain't going to win the race. That's the conclusion I came to in December of '07, and then work to be able to leave and go on to something else. What have you learned about the power of relationships and trust? I think integrity is the most important thing in business and definitely as a leader. You can't be a leader unless there's integrity. You can't be a leader unless people trust you because people have to allow you to be their leader. This is volunteer. If you try to use power of the leader, that reservoir goes down and it never comes back. You got to influence. People have to believe what you say. You taught me the vulnerability of they want you to know that you're human. I didn't always accept that because I was Spock. I was always friendly. I was always decent and nice, but I'd never shown vulnerability because that had been used against me prior my career. You want to be vulnerable so people know that you're human and you bleed and you feel the same things that you do. The biggest thing, David, I think you have to say is that when you make a mistake, when you disappoint someone, you got to go public with it and say, "I'm sorry and I apologize." That won't happen again to this degree. When you work with people, they're not machines. Often, you have to let people win sometimes even when they don't deserve to win . I'm not talking about people that break the rules, but you go on a restaurant on a Friday, high volume, and they're not having a great day. As a leader, you can't go in and pour acid on that situation. You can't go in and list 100 things they ain't doing right. What you have to do is say, "How do you calm them down and how do you get them elevated one level grade so you can leave?" How do you make it better? I'll come back and talk to you about the deficiencies I see tomorrow, but when you're in a high pressure environment, you got to be smart about it. You got to be calm. That's what people look for leaders to do. How do you make me better? One of the mindsets I had was when I went out in the field, I was trying to bring my A-game so I could have an impact on someone. I was trying to change a life. That rarely can happen, but if you had the mindset of, "Someone today, I'm going to do something to say something that may change their life," you got to shock to do it. That was my mindset when I went out and dealt with the folks, talking to folks. Believe in them folks. Even now, I meet people and they're like, "Gee, you had an impact on me. Are you said something to me 20 years ago that really, as you get older, you don't always remember names or something?" That's important and that was the intention. Trust is everything. It's everything. You move on from Sears and Kmart and you go to become the CEO of Potbelly. Now you're back in the business that you really love. Tell us about the Potbelly brand itself and what you inherited at the time. It was small. It had been 160 stores. They had a great store culture. Great food, tremendous throughput. They did a great job of hiring nice people and teaching them a potbelly way. Then at the headquarters that they call, we changed it to a support center. There are 200 people that were geared for the future growth. When I got hired, they had a $50 million. This is '08. They had a $50 million revolver and they were going to use that revolver to build the business. We had seven private equity investors and they had done seven rounds and they weren't putting more money in. I get there and in two weeks you go through the numbers, you find out they're borrowing a million dollars a month just to make payroll. Two hundred people at this small company at headquarters and they were totally disassociated from the stores. While the stores had this great culture doing amazing things, the folks at the support center had nothing to do with it. My first job was to buy 120 people so we got down to 80 people. Stores were averaging $1.2 million. We had a restaurant margin of 15 so you have to grow that. '08 happens but throughout all of that, what was important was how do we establish the culture. Basically what I did once we picked the team is we documented the culture that existed in the stores was very strong. The service don't mess that up. Throughput don't mess that up. Then we just started teaching the cultures. We had six values that we drove. We had this one pager that you taught us all how to do. It was called the Pop Billie Advantage. We had our vision, our mission, our passion, and then our strategic framework. That's how we ran the company. We taught that throughout the whole company. If you got hired no matter when you got hired, where you got hired in the company, you had to talk about the Pop Billie Advantage within two weeks of being hired. We started every meeting by asking someone to talk about the Pop Billie Advantage. It was a great brand. I called it the neighborhood sample. We did the Aca model but we best placed for lunch because 60% of our business between 11 and two, very predictable, and neighborhood sandwich shop. That's how we ran the brand. Didn't have enough money to advertising so the experience had to be there. Our ratings were off the charts. We had a 98% customer satisfaction rating and purchase re-intentioned. You bought comeback again. That was over 95%. Super low turnover. I was there for nine years. I would say seven and a half. Those were really excellent. When I left after nine years, we'd gotten to 500 restaurants. We'd gone from minus 16 million of E-B-Dada the first couple of years to 50 million. I always said I wish we had done that during the Clinton years because you could have been at Chipotle of sandwiches. When you're going into Denver and your seventh sandwich player in, they have a better mousetrap but it becomes just tremendously difficult. You're competing for the same spaces as a—we started doing drive-thoos which were tremendous but you're competing with Starbucks and Chipotle for those things. It was great ride. Culture was very important. It woke up in April of 2017 and said this summer I will have been in the business for 40 years. That's enough. I retired in August of that year. Great brand, great product. The intersection between the customer, the product and the employees, the associates was just at a very high level and we really drove that. Have you ever wondered what David is thinking as he interviews our guest each week or have you been interested in hearing David's take on some of the questions that he asks his guest? Well, I do and I know a lot of you do too. My name is Koolah Callahan and together with David I host the three more questions podcast that airs every Monday. These episodes are just about 15 minutes and in them I asked David three questions that dive deeper into the themes of his episode with his guests. David shares incredible insights and stories from his career leading young brands and all of his answers are super practical and inspiring. Like this great insight David shared in one of our most recent three more questions episodes. Be here now. When you're with someone give them your full attention and that means listening to them. Don't be looking at your phone. Don't be talking on the phone. Don't be multitasking. Really be here now with whoever you happen to be with at that specific point in time. That's how you're going to learn from them. That's how you're going to understand what they have to say and that's how you 're going to be able to do one plus one equals three. Because you really can't go it alone. You need the help of other people and the only way you can get that help is to recognize the fact that you need to listen to them and give them your full attention. Get the three more questions podcasts in your feed each Monday and dive even deeper into the episodes you know and love. Just subscribe to How Leaders Lead wherever you get your podcasts. So you're in this hugely competitive category sandwich category. I don't know if there's anything more competitive than that. How much of your time did you spend focusing on competition? I was aware. What we tried to do is say when we were when Chipotle and Purnera was our size that became our comparison. So those are our hero brands. When I was out in the field I would just always go and visit those two companies to see how they did things and understand their history and how they grew. Talk to their founders about key points. I knew a ton of folks from Starbucks so I had that as a comparison. And that's kind of what we used as I touched on in our guiding point. Very aware and very appreciative of the work and the marketing that Subway did although we didn't want to be Subway. But they created a healthy glow for sandwiches and made that the counter to fast food. And so very appreciative of that. We had a great bounce trap. Our throughput we could do up to 300 orders every half hour. Our high volume store was Midway Airport. When I got there it was doing about five million a year. When I left it was doing nine million dollars a year. And it didn't have any different equipment than the other stores. Throughput was great. We definitely had to have great operations because experience was everything. That sandwich shop was our marketing. And we hired from the neighborhood and our goal was to have 80% of our managers work in their neighborhood. That became a really big deal because then I got no travel. I'm serving the customers of my kids that go to school. I'm banking at the same bank that I'm banking in. So my neighbors are my customers. And I feel like when people are serving their friends and their neighbors they put a little extra juice in it. So it was a great experience on can culture really drive it. Take it down to the front line. We taught three values twice a year. Two hour classes down to the front line. My experience was a multiplier because the business was small. Started franchising. Had 30 units in the Middle East. We had London. We had Toronto. And so it was a great experience. I wanted to stay around long enough to get to 1000 units but just didn't make it. If you were talking to new employees of Popelli, how would you describe the personal opportunity they had? 95% of our managers started as team members. 75% of our district managers, people running six to eight restaurants, they started as team members. Our regional managers, 50% of those folks started as team members. We had more opportunity than we had people available to fill it. When I left, I said I fired 120 out of 200. So that was 80. When I left, we had 89 people at the center. So we spent our money closer to the customers. They have trainers. They have training restaurants. They have district managers. When you're growing at 20% K-girl off a small base, I wanted to make sure the resources were spent closer to the customer. So when you have 80 people and nine years later you have 89, that means when you hire someone at the center, you wanted flexibility. We hired a guy who was our planner. He did the store plans. We lost our very competent supply chain guy. He raised his hand and volunteered and became a tremendous, tremendous talent with supply chain. He's CFO of a company now. So it just reinforced the power of when you hire the right people, when you're used to culture to hire them, you do a lot of training and development, you can really create an army of leaders. And so that was the frontline focus of you start today. It's a starting point, but we need GMs. We need district managers. We need regional managers. And we could fulfill that. What advice can you give on how to drive customer focus throughout your organization? First, I think you've got to put the customer centerpiece when you're sitting around the table making decisions. The CEO needs to represent the customer. Marketing person needs to represent the customer. Operating needs to represent the customer first. Customers got to be the center of everything you do. It's old fashioned now, but I love focus groups. Bring the customers in. You taught me this thing called problem detention study. You should always do those. So you go into town under problems that are detected in your business and in your brand. You got to do a brand health study every now and then to understand how healthy to brand is and whether you're meeting your brand promise. And then you cannot turn a grub bunny into a customer service expert. If they're not smiling and that was the beauty of popular. Now we're small. We ended up with like 7,000 customers and you were managing a million associates. I mean, I believe around every restaurant, there's 20 to 30 people that are good people that will smile that want to serve customers. And that's what you got to give your manager permission to do. Do not hire grub bunnies, hire personalities and then you can teach them the skill. And that's important. You want smiling faces and then you got to have your managers understand their role. It's more the results are important by how you get the results, getting the results through people are very difficult, but that is the mission. And so I can't have a manager that comes to work every day and don't speak. I can't have a manager comes to work that don't believe in the values. I can't have a manager that's not going to help a customer when they see a customer. I can't have a manager get out their car, walk across the parking lot and don't pick up trash. All that stuff since signals that customers are important. And when your orientation is customer first, all those things are important. I had a guy once tell me the best marketing is a clean restroom. And that's absolutely true. Don't talk to you about the latest limited time offer. If the restroom's dirty, that mindset of customer first is important. Oh, and this has been a lot of fun. I want to have some more with the lightning round of questions here. Are you ready for this? Yes, sir. What is one word others would use to best describe you? Fair. What's the one word you think best describes you? Honest. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? St. Paul. What's your biggest pet peeve? Dirty restaurants, dirty houses. I hate dirty environments. What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say Lyndon Baines Johnson? Civil rights. The second freedom for black folks in America, voting right act. Bill Russell. Oh, greatest champion in the history of sports. Martin Luther King. Necessary, visionary, non-violent. Change things through love and through forcing people to look evil in the eye. Bill Clinton. Smart. Communicator. You're a great president with lousy values. LeBron James. Awesome human being. Tremendous, talented basketball player. And he's either one or two in the goat conversation. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? Oh, you'd hear a soft rock, classic rock. You went to see the Eagles in Denver last week, so, you know, kind of oldies. What's something about you that few people would know? I'm introvert, very shy person, very introverted. That's the end of the lightning round, Owen. And now I got a few more questions. We'll wrap this up. Owen, you describe yourself as a knowledge acquirer. How do you go about building your own personal know-how? You have to have a high interest in it, and it's something you do without effort. Acquiring knowledge for me, I do without effort, and I do it every waking moment I boast. I mean, you know, even doing your job, you're asking questions, you're reading things, and you want to learn things so you can discern patterns that can help you be better, help you solve problems, help you become a better person. My whole life is dedicated to being a student. I mean, and an older you get, you recognize you're going to run out of time. But it's something you love, it's something you're good at, it's something you do all the time. It's not hard work for you. And speaking of hard work, you are one of the hardest workers that I have ever known in my life. You know, what have you learned about time management over the years? Well, you know, I planned everything, right? And because that's the way you get things done. I used to stuff too much into it. Time is the one resource that you can't recover once it's lost. And so you should guard it and manage it pressiously. Even though I retire, I still do to do lists. I still do yearly goals that I'm going after. And time management is important. I don't know how you can accomplish things out of plan. You know, I was very planful. One of the big things was tactical plans in restaurants so it could help managers reach their goals. So time management is everything. And heaven knows there's enough tools now on the internet that can help you manage your time. You know, you were on the Disney board and you worked with one of the most famous CEOs of our era, Bob Iger. What impressed you most about him? Bob had encyclopedic knowledge of his company. In my 15 years on the board, he had a flat organization, 13 people reported into him. And he defined his role as being the leader, being the culture carrier. But more importantly, he called himself the Uber editor, which meant, can I bring good taste and high standards to everything that we do? And he did that very well. He's a very unassuming guy. His role of decks was tremendous. You know, in a day, he could talk to a country leader, commissioner of a sports team, and then talk to a great basketball player. And he kept all of that stuff under wraps and had tremendous amount of humility . Definitely Hall of Fame doing the time that I knew him. I'll never forget when our leadership team got together with our husbands and wives. And each of us placed ourselves in four quadrants. You could either be a promoter, an analyzer, a supporter, and a controller. Now you put yourself in the supporter quadrant, and noveling your wife said you would support people only if you could control them. How important is it for you to have a truth teller like noveling in your life? That was such an interesting thing for her to say in front of my peers. And so we celebrated 40 years of marriage this past June. And you can't go through life and reach what I've done without a partner that 'll keep you steady, that you can trust, that you know, manage the annual budget, cash all the checks, do all the right things, and you never have to worry about that for one minute. And so she's been a tremendous part of my life. I've lived with her longer than anybody. And you know, not that you've been retired for six years. So it's been a lot of time 24/7, but definitely if you say one or two, three people have had the most impact on your life, mom would probably be number one and wife would be number two. You know, a person like yourself would be number three, number four. But you can't go through life successfully without someone that's going to help you. And going to tell you the truth and it's going to keep you also true to yourself. And she's definitely that. One of the things that I learned working with you was just the power of working with someone who's passionate and committed and willing to do the work to really take a business forward. And the other thing I learned from you is that once I put you in a leadership position, it was amazing how many black leaders emerged at Yum. People who just absolutely kicked butt did great jobs. And you really took great joy in finding these diamonds in the roughs and pulling them up and giving them opportunity. What advice can you give people on how to really make a difference in diversity and not just give it lip service? Dave, thank you for that. It was a focal point of bringing underrepresented people and opening a door. It's got to be top of mind. You've got to find diversity that's competent. You got to find diversity that's hungry. It starts with the values. It starts with people that's willing to demonstrate that they're going to work their butts off. You want them to be humble, but you don't need them to have a service mentality to you as the leader. You want them to serve the mission. You want them to serve the customers. You want them to be committed to results. I call it qualified diversity. And there are people out there that are willing, are you willing to do the work ? And then how can we create companies and environments where there's no barriers for any person that matches your values? The beauty of what you allowed to happen in our company was we could bring these folks on. We could develop them. We could train them. We used them money well and then allowed them to demonstrate. And then once they could get to a level where they could protect themselves, then they were part of the process of saying how to bring other leaders on. So it starts at the top of your organization. You had that orientation of common person, underdog. How do we help them? But we wouldn't run into charity. We didn't want to look at majority men and women and say, you're not wanted here. The reason you want a company that's growing is that the opportunity is there and it's not the expense of anyone. I believe in the rainbow. And when you get our results and when you meet our culture, I don't care about the other stuff. I don't care the color. I don't care sexual orientation. I don't care when you went to school. If you're one of us because you believe our values and you're getting our results the right way and you're treating our customers the right way, have at it. And I think that's the beauty. But it started with you at the top of your organization. And so I always rail against people who, number one, you don't make the statement. You do the work. I hate these organizations that, oh, we're going to do this. Well, the minute you announce it, you're drawing attention. Just do the work and let the folks who are benefited from it becomes your story . Well, thank you for that, Alwyn. And the reason why I bring up the noveleam story where she said you'll support you only if you could control you is because all of us on the team had a lot of fun with that. Okay. Giving you a lot of grief over it. Yes, I know. But the fact of the matter is almost every leader that I've ever known, you included myself, we're all controllers to a certain extent. We want to control our environment so that we can be accountable for what goes on. But if I had to pick one thing that I would say should be attached to you and the quadrant that you're in is you're definitely our supporter. I mean, you really, really championed people and championed me and championed the rest of the team. And I want to thank you for everything you did for me and Yum and so many other people. I mean, one thing listeners, you need to know is this guy did find talent everywhere and gave people unbelievable opportunities. People who really didn't have the perfect pedigree and they absolutely did fantastic in our business. And I'm sure in the retail business that he runs. So Alwyn, thanks so much for being on this show. I really appreciate you. I wouldn't have not achieved what I've achieved in my career, my life without you and your support. It's an honor to talk to you today and love you and you and your family. And thank you very much for this opportunity. As Alwyn so wisely puts it, without results, nothing is possible. Results are how you stand out. And they're not just numbers on a page. They're proof that the systems and people you're putting in place are really working and that customers are happy. As a leader, it's your responsibility to create an environment where everyone can bring their A game and deliver results. This week, ask yourself, where do you need to be paying closer attention to results, either in your own career or for your team? Make sure you're not losing sight of that because when you deliver great results, you also create more opportunities for both you and everyone around you. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders recognize that results are paramount . Coming up next on how leaders lead is Tim Schur, the CEO of my company, David Novak Leadership. But I've just found that for me, success is in the assist. I just believe that some really amazing things can happen when you're willing to come alongside others, try to make them successful. I just believe that that's us on a better path and that's how I've tried to show up in my life for sure. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [ Silence ]