Transcript: Ron Shaich, Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread & CAVA

The transcript from this week’s MiB: Ron Shaich, Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread & CAVA, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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00:00:02 [Speaker Changed] Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. This is Masters in business with Barry Riol on Bloomberg Radio

00:00:16 [Speaker Changed] This week on the podcast, what can I say? Ron Shake is a legend in the fast casual dining space. He began with a single restaurant, a single cookie store, and eventually parlayed that into a series of acquisitions, mergers, expansions, ultimately leading to the Panera Bread concept, which now has 2000 locations and does about six and a half billion dollars. He sold the company in 2017 or so for about seven and a half billion dollars. He now runs Act three, which is a fascinating sort of venture funds. One of their big firms is Kava Fast Mediterranean cuisine. What can I tell you? The guy is a brilliant operator, one of the best performing publicly traded CEOs in history, at least in the, in the food and consumer services sector. He knows everybody from the head of Starbucks to Sam Adams, to to Shake Shack. All those people travel in the same circles. He has carved out his own unique identity and space. And I just thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you will also. So with no further ado, my discussion with the former chairman and CEO of OAL Pan and Panera Bread. Ron Shaik. Ron Shaik. Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you,

00:01:49 [Speaker Changed] Barry. Good

00:01:49 [Speaker Changed] To speak you. So, so those numbers are astonishing. And I also recall reading Panera was the best performing restaurant stock in the last decade. You were CEO second best consumer stock on the s and p are those data points, right?

00:02:05 [Speaker Changed] Yes. And but to be, to be clear, I sold Panera in 2017 and have not had anything to do with it since then. But I am today a lead investor and the chairman at Kava help take that thing public.

00:02:20 [Speaker Changed] We we’re gonna talk about kava, we’re gonna talk about know what matters, the book you wrote. Yeah. Lessons from a lifetime of transformation. But let me roll this all the way back Sure. To your education bachelor’s from Clark in 1976, MBA from Harvard in 78.

00:02:37 [Speaker Changed] Don’t hold that against me. What,

00:02:38 [Speaker Changed] What was the career plan, by the way? You are not the first Harvard MBA I’ve had in the studio.

00:02:44 [Speaker Changed] Okay. I, I guess I would say to you this, I I never really had a career plan. I had a drive to make a difference. And the challenge for me was whether that was gonna take form is politics, which was a love of mine or business. And I found over the years that, that when I was doing business, I brought a strategic or political context to it when I was doing politics or political campaign management. It was a business. Put another way, a business is an election that never ends. And I, a political campaign is a, is a business that, that has one judgment day. The election day.

00:03:23 [Speaker Changed] Huh? That, that’s fascinating. So, so there was a quote from you, maybe this was from the book. You, you go to business school, you didn’t know what an investment banker was.

00:03:33 [Speaker Changed] I didn’t, no. I, you know, I, I actually never set out to do business. I had been the treasurer of the student council at Clark, and I was tossed out with a couple of friends from a local convenience store. They’d suggested we were shoplifting, we weren’t, but it was just a heavy security presence. And I came back to campus and I said, you know what? Why are we giving these guys our money? Why don’t we create our own student run store? And I was able to tax campus co-op. Yeah. I taxed the student body. They, they agreed to it. And there was nobody else there to, to essentially build the store. I built it. There was nobody to run it. I ran it. And as a, a kid who really thought he was gonna go to law school like you, Barry, and had never, you know, I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t sing. I, I, I, I discovered How’s

00:04:21 [Speaker Changed] Your outside

00:04:21 [Speaker Changed] Shot? My outside shot’s better than how I dance, you know? But, but I, I have to tell you. Yeah. I have to tell you that I had more fun. It was the most creative endeavor I had ever been involved in. Really sly performance art. Yeah. And I love food. I love retail. I love running the place, I love the people. And it became sort of a, a, a way I live my life.

00:04:43 [Speaker Changed] That, that’s really fascinating. So that tees up what becomes, at least the first part of your career. Tell us about the work you did at a cookie company.

00:04:53 [Speaker Changed] Oh, I started a cookie company. So I, I, I got outta business school. I took what I call the third year of the MBAI, I went to learn. I went to work for a company called Cole National and helped run a part of their company called the Original Cookie Company.

00:05:10 [Speaker Changed] I remember that. Do you?

00:05:11 [Speaker Changed] Oh, sure. Yeah. I was in the malls. Yeah, right.

00:05:13 [Speaker Changed] That’s

00:05:13 [Speaker Changed] Right. Yeah. I learned, I was a district manager. I was running stores. I, I I came back, Dan Quail, I remember I was in Indiana and it was a Dan Quail for the US Senate billboard up. And I came back and wanted to do political campaigns, and I couldn’t get a, a job. And I, I decided I was gonna try to open a my own cookie store. And in, in, in, and at that point, all the cookie stores were in malls. I said, let’s open it where there were lots of people in Boston, there’s a place called Park Street Station. It’s the entrance way to the, the downtown and the financial district. I thought, why don’t open a cookie store there? And in fact, I ultimately found the job in political campaign consulting. But I was, while I was down in DC I was offered a location near Park Street Station. I had thought I’d come back one day a week. I ended up creating this cookie store that was a two day a week, three day a week endeavor. I never went back to DC to run campaigns. And that cookie store later was merged with Alpen. And that company, which we created in 1981, was the company I sold for 7.8 billion, literally in 2017.

00:06:31 [Speaker Changed] So, so let’s, let’s go back to that acquisition. You again, and I don’t remember if I read this in the book or somewhere else. Nobody buys cookies before noon.

00:06:42 [Speaker Changed] This is a challenge. Yes.

00:06:43 [Speaker Changed] Right. But croissant and baked breads and other goods like that, that’s perfect. Breakfast fair. Was that the obvious? Let’s combine these two. We’ll cover the whole day as long as we’re paying rent for 24 hours. Well,

00:06:55 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I mean, I’m running this cookie store for about six months, having a time of my life. But as, as you said, nobody was buying cookies before 12 noon. And I had about 50,000 people a day walking by me. So I said, what can I put in here that could represent a product that would appeal to people in the morning? And I decided to become a licensee of a French bakery. And there was a number that were actually in that business. I hooked up with a group called OBO Pen. And they had, at that point, three bakeries. They had at one point opened, I think 13 of them, close, 10 of them. I didn’t fully understand they were on the edge of bankruptcy, but I did a deal with them. I became their licensee for this one square block.

00:07:42 [Speaker Changed] So a little background about that. The predecessor of one of the companies, and I don’t remember if this was all ball past something else, was Pavilion, a French manufacturer of

00:07:53 [Speaker Changed] Pave Jer Pavier. We, we gotta work on your French barrier.

00:07:56 [Speaker Changed] Well, al but not very well. If I’m gonna Paris, I’ll bone out. But Paul

00:08:02 [Speaker Changed] VRAN pet

00:08:03 [Speaker Changed] Imp petit. So they were setting up bakeries in order to sell their ovens. It sounds like you said, Hey, forget the ovens. Let’s sell the baked goods.

00:08:14 [Speaker Changed] Well act actually, PAER founded OB Pen. A group bought the company. It was led by the man who became my partner of over two decades, a gentleman named Lou Kane. Lou Kain and his partners bought the O Pen from Paer. And, and to be clear, they, they, they essentially thought they could grow this across North America. And there were sort of delusions of grandeur.

00:08:46 [Speaker Changed] They were right. They just had the wrong operator.

00:08:48 [Speaker Changed] They had, they had the wrong operator. They had probably the wrong concept. And that’s what led them to borrowing a great deal of money against their own personal real estate. Right. And as I said, opening 13 units of which by the time I came along, they had closed 10 of them.

00:09:05 [Speaker Changed] So you licensed the spot. How does that lead to eventually purchasing Obum Pot? Well,

00:09:11 [Speaker Changed] I’m, I’m, I’m their licensee for about six months, and I began to become friends with their CEOA gentleman named Lou Kane, who had essentially was running the company. And it was very clear to me the trouble they were in. And I began to say this was a powerful opportunity to apply what I knew about running food businesses and actually create the kind of company I wanted to work for. I wanted to build. And I went to Lou with an idea. And the idea was we would merge our two companies, my one cookie store, his three French bakeries, and their, their $3 million in debt. I had the cash cow, they had the three stores. And I, I really thought I could operate my way out of the business. And what ended up happening is I received 60% of the company, Le and his partners kept 40% of the new company. And then we went marching off that company, O Bump and Co Inc. Was the company I ended up running for nearly 37 years.

00:10:12 [Speaker Changed] So 37 years. And along the way, you, IPO in 19 91, 27

00:10:19 [Speaker Changed] Years as a public company, CEO Barry, longer than Cal Ripkin played baseball. That’s

00:10:24 [Speaker Changed] Unbelievable.

00:10:24 [Speaker Changed] And I’m still standing. That’s unbelievable. We pleased. But I’m still standing.

00:10:27 [Speaker Changed] You, you, you know, Warren Buffet and Jamie Diamond, probably your, your two

00:10:31 [Speaker Changed] Competitors. Some say I had a better performance than Warren Buffet in my last 20 years as a public company. CEO.

00:10:37 [Speaker Changed] Well, he’s back loaded. So he, he began strong and then did okay afterwards. Yeah. But, but what’s really fascinating is how do you go from, you know, three or four locations to an IPO in 19 91, 3

00:10:54 [Speaker Changed] And four, three to four, three or four locations that were bleeding, we’re losing money. You know, I I I’m always trying to learn, and probably the most powerful thing in my life is not the success. It’s the learning and then the action one takes from the learning. And I, I had a revelation in the early eighties. I, I would be working in one of these French bakeries and people walk in and say, you know what? I want that baguette. And I’d start to slice it for ’em. They’d say, oh, don’t slice it. Like bread, slice it from top to bottom. Right? And I’d hand them the baguette and they’d look at me, Barry and they’d, and, and, and they’d pull out a bag from Stop and Shop. And they put, make a sandwich. Yeah. They’d put meat on it. Boon, you know, cheese smoked Turkey. And again, you didn’t have to have a, a Harvard MBA to say, you know, the opportunity is not in the bread and croissant. The opportunity isn’t what the bread and croissant can allow the consumer to do. So we said, instead of selling the bread, bread and croissant, let’s sell the product they want. Which was the sandwich that allowed us to create the first of what became many, many units, which was a French bakery cafe up in Copley Square in Boston.

00:12:05 [Speaker Changed] So, so that included breakfast croissants and, and I’m assuming other breakfast sandwiches, full lunch soup, salad sandwiches. Oh, yes. The whole thing. And, and suddenly it’s not just a $2 item. Suddenly you’re selling actual product.

00:12:20 [Speaker Changed] And, and, and, and again, I’m always looking for what job am I doing for people? What’s the need I’m meeting? And, and we were really the first

00:12:29 Concept at Old Bump Pen in the, in the, the late eighties that was serving white collar folk food that they wanted with quick service. And so Lou, my partner, was an extraordinary human being. We worked together till he passed away. Lou had tremendous real estate connections all over the East Coast and in the Midwest. And, and we were in every major building where here we were in New York at Rockefeller Center, world Financial Center, world Trade Center. But at Rock Center, the, you know, the folks would come down and this was the only place they could get really food that they respected and respected them

00:13:07 [Speaker Changed] Quality food at a reasonable price reasonably quickly.

00:13:10 [Speaker Changed] The price wasn’t even the, the, the, the, the reason for existence, our reason for existence was this was food People really wanted, and they were willing to pay for it. They were willing to pay more than they could get when the alternatives were fast food or a lengthy lunch at, at, at a sit down

00:13:25 [Speaker Changed] Restaurant. There was, there was nothing in between. Right. And I’m thinking back to that eighties and nineties era. Your choice was McDonald’s or Burger King, maybe Pizza Hut, maybe like

00:13:37 [Speaker Changed] Taco or the Pool Grill Taco Bell. That the Four Seasons, you know, I mean, right. I mean, it was you, you know, back then it was fast food or fine dining

00:13:45 [Speaker Changed] And nothing in between. Nothing

00:13:47 [Speaker Changed] In between. And if you had 30 minutes,

00:13:48 [Speaker Changed] So this was really, this was a white space wide open. Yeah. Nobody else was there. Yeah.

00:13:52 [Speaker Changed] I would say that was really true. And, and I think this became very hot, this whole French bakery, cafe category, and malls all over the country. We had everybody come after us. Pepsi came after us. This was gonna be the third leg of Pepsi Food Service. Sarah Lee came after us, a company called Vita France, which has now gone by the wayside. All of these companies had, were, were, were larger, had more capital. But the truth was we ended up running rings around them. We cared more. Our folks were more dedicated. We worked harder. And by 1991, we had built this out to, to probably a hundred units. We had the highest average unit volumes in, in, in, in, in the category. It was very clear we were gonna be the winner. And we went public with Morgan Stanley in an IPO in, in, in June of 1991.

00:14:44 [Speaker Changed] So after the IPO, you eventually acquire St. Louis Bread Company later to be renamed Panera Bread. Tell us how that transformed the

00:14:54 [Speaker Changed] Entire relationship. Well, the, the key is the learning. So the first thing I began to realize after the IPO was that the market pays for growth. And yet, OBO Pen’s growth at that point was somewhat limited. OB bump pen was at its best in these urban locations. It didn’t work in the mall in la Right. You know, and, and, and so we expanded into a number of different other businesses. We built an international business. If the Pen was the best United States at high density urban feeding, there were more locations outside America. We built a manufacturing business. We were manufacturing all of our product, and we were selling it also in supermarkets across par

00:15:35 [Speaker Changed] Product, meaning food or ovens

00:15:37 [Speaker Changed] And bake equipment, bake goods, not, not kitchen equipment, bake goods. And, and then third, we, we bought in 1993, a business called St. Louis Bread Company from a wonderful human being named Ken Rosenthal in St. Louis. It was 19 stores at that point. And I thought this would be the gateway to the suburban marketplace. At the same time, I was trying to figure out what was going on for the consumer. And I was running around the West coast for about a year or year and a half, with a guy who’s now one of my partners, Dwight Juin, a guy named Scott Davis, who was our, our, our, our concept officer. And we were trying to figure out what was the themes that were impacting consumers. And we began to develop a, a, a belief that the really important signal that needed to be read, the deeper trend was that consumers were rejecting the mass market.

00:16:36 And they wanted to feel special in a world which had increasingly become consolidated and oligopolies. Think Coffee and Miller and, and or Think Coffee and Folgers and Maxwell House Beer, Anheuser Busch and Miller, think Soft Drinks, Coke and Pepsi, every one of those in the early nineties had a reaction. You can, you can, you can talk about Starbucks, you can talk about what you see occur with specialty beer. A good friend of mine in Boston, Jim Cook, developed Sam Adams. Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course. Again, a reaction of the mass market. We, we, we saw the same thing as Coke and Pepsi lent itself to a Waldo and Snapple and, and, and 400 beverages in, in seven 11. And we began to say this was a deeper trend. Consumers rejecting that mass market and wanted specialty goods built, made the way their grandparents made it without chemicals, without preservers.

00:17:33 And we said the same thing was gonna happen in the food industry. And in fact, the same thing was happening in the bakery industry. Baked breads have once been done in, in stone deck ovens that had become three lows for nine, 9 cents at supermarkets. And, and, and consumers wanted that kind of quality that they hadn’t had, and were willing to pay for it. And we began to say there was a powerful opportunity in specialty food, specialty restaurants, much like there was this powerful opportunity in specialty coffee, specialty beer, specialty beverages. And that was the genesis for what became this ideology, this paradigm that’s today called fast Casual. What it said, what it spoke to was real food, actually. People that, that, that engaged you, served in environments that excited you and ultimately left your sense of self-esteem. What you felt about yourself. It elevated it as opposed to depleting it as fast food did. The currencies of fast food were a lot of food for not a lot of money. The currencies of fast casualties, let’s do something better for a bit more money. And the result, that category that, that, that understanding is today a $300 billion category.

00:18:51 [Speaker Changed] So, so let’s

00:18:52 [Speaker Changed] Talk, we did it just to finish it up. We did it. Howard Schultz came along about that time, Steve ELLs a little bit later. But it was a paradigm that informed a whole new category when people said you couldn’t do this.

00:19:05 [Speaker Changed] Steve ELLs is with what? Chipotle. Chipotle. All right. So let’s, you mentioned Howard Schultz and Starbucks. I think of Starbucks as a coffee shop that serves food. I think of, is

00:19:16 [Speaker Changed] That food? No, I don’t want that

00:19:17 [Speaker Changed] Myself to, sorry, excuse me. Well, it’s not exactly fresh. I know. Some of that stuff has to be frozen.

00:19:26 [Speaker Changed] No, all of it is. All of it is. Yeah. I mean, they, we, these businesses are, are defined by their systems. So when we look at Starbucks, and they tried many times to improve the quality of food, Howard Got it. And in fact, we actually, I, I worked with him probably two or three times trying to help him think about that question. We were, we were friends.

00:19:49 [Speaker Changed] Why would you help your, one of your largest competitors catch up to you on the food space? I have to ask that.

00:19:55 [Speaker Changed] Well, we were kind of frenemies. It went back for 35 years when he had had, you know, four or five stores in Seattle. And he had, you know, we were looking to bring specialty coffee into Obon Pen. And ultimately we chose to go take a, a ownership position, a company called Coffee Connection in Boston, which was the Starbucks of the East Coast. And, and he wanted to buy Star Coffee connection. And we went through a process. We had a right of first refusal. We drove up the price. But, but we had a friendly rivalry. And the truth of the matter is, I profoundly respected Howard.

00:20:33 [Speaker Changed] I clearly built an amazing business.

00:20:35 [Speaker Changed] Well, I respected not just the size of the business, but he shared with us the same values about really doing something that delighted customers, that made a difference. He broke through on, on design and environment and, and, and what it meant. And, and so, you know, we always had this relationship of both competition and mutual respect.

00:20:59 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That’s really fascinating. I’m gonna share a Starbucks story that I bet you haven’t heard. I’m curious as to your thoughts. And I believe Howard Schultz was gone when this happened. ’cause I can’t imagine. Well,

00:21:11 [Speaker Changed] Howard re re you know, pulled out of Starbucks, I think three or four times. So, right. So

00:21:15 [Speaker Changed] During the pandemic, I get two emails on the same day. The first one is from Delta. Hey, we know that you’ve worked hard to achieve your platinum medallion status, and the pandemic is a disaster. Don’t worry, we’re gonna roll your status over next year when hopefully things will be back to normal and you’ll be flying again. I’m like, gee, you know, Delta really has their act together. How, how thoughtful. The same day I get an email from Starbucks, Hey, you’ve accumulated 317 Starbucks points because you’re here all the time. But unfortunately, due to the pandemic, these will expire next month. And the third leg of the stool was a link, a story in the Wall Street Journal that everybody who preloads their credit card onto the Starbucks apps we’re essentially giving Starbucks a $3 billion interest free loan. Sure. And I was so morally indignant over the, you’re gonna take our crappy

00:22:20 [Speaker Changed] Loyalty points. Loyalty

00:22:22 [Speaker Changed] Points away. Like they cost you nothing. And you know what, you are bad players get refund. My, my 50 bucks that’s on the app. I’m deleting the app. Thanks Starbucks, for the past few years. I’m not boycotting you, but you’re like, something I’ll put up with. And Starbucks to me today is like McDonald’s. It

00:22:47 [Speaker Changed] Is McDonald’s. It’s a,

00:22:48 [Speaker Changed] I worked at McDonald’s for two days in high school, have never gone back since. It’s a horrific source of, you know, junk food. And I don’t know what they’ve done the ensuing hundred years, but I don’t step foot into McDonald’s and I rarely step foot in Starbucks, oba and Panera on the other hand, and I’m not blowing smoke.

00:23:12 [Speaker Changed] Try. Have you been to our new concept? TI

00:23:14 [Speaker Changed] Have not.

00:23:15 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s 45 restaurants in Boston and DC It’s fact, we’re opening this week in Ridge, Ridgewood, New Jersey. We’ll be opening in Garden City. And

00:23:26 [Speaker Changed] Garden City’s not far from where I live. I’ll definitely check out

00:23:28 [Speaker Changed] Here in Manhattan. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s third wave coffee. It’s, it’s Levon infused baked goods, Levon, Israel, Turkey, really in north North Africa, Lebanon. It’s fascinating. And then we have chefs in every unit. We’re doing real food again from the lavant, but, but fascinating real food and doing really significant volumes. Back to your, your story. Yeah. You know, here’s the point. Starbucks has been through many waves. Brian Nichols friend, very good guy. He’s doing the right stuff. He’s doing what Howard did when that business was formed, which is focusing on a competitive advantage as doing a better job for the guest. If you don’t make a difference for the guest, you have no right to be in business. And the reality is, in my industry, my industry is the second oldest profession in the world. The food industry, you know, if, if, if you don’t have a competitive advantage, a reason, the customers are walking past your competitors to choose you, all you’re gonna do is gonna get your market share. And when you get your market share, this is dirt farming. And that’s ultimately what happened to Starbucks. And what Brian is trying to do is reassert its points of difference. Its specialness in a way that that delights guests and gets them to come back. And when you tell your story of Starbucks, it speaks to how Starbucks was actually diminished by, by management. It’s bad profit when you’re abusing customers and it’s good profit when you’re making a difference in the lives of your guests.

00:25:05 [Speaker Changed] You have such a fascinating background and you’ve dealt with so many really interesting people in competitive space. I, I I, we talked earlier about you being frenemies with Howard Schultz and, and Starbucks. Take me through how you go from IPOing at to acquiring Panera. What was, what was that experience like?

00:25:32 [Speaker Changed] Well, we didn’t acquire Panera. We acquired a, a business

00:25:35 [Speaker Changed] St. Louis Bread co. We

00:25:36 [Speaker Changed] Acquired a company called St. Louis Bread Company. We recognized the ideology and power of what would later be called fast casual, real food for real people. We ended up using St. Louis Bread Company as a test laboratory to apply those principles. We changed everything. We took a unit doing a million dollars a year, we added breakfast. That took us to 1,000,002 50. We changed the environment in big ways. That took us to 1,000,007 50, added a gathering place segment. And by 1995, I realized the name St. Louis Bread Company was the wrong name to take national. And we changed the name to Panera Bread. And the, the big and very important step was really in 1998, I at that point was running a public company with four divisions, OBO Pen, OBO Pen, international Pen Manufacturing, and this thing called Panera Bread. Panera was the third largest of them.

00:26:37 I I, I have to tell you, I would look at Panera and say, this brand has the potential to be nationally dominant. And it wasn’t at that point, but it had it, it had consistent volumes. And I was, I was struck by the degree to which the folks that were running it didn’t really understand what growth was gonna take and what was gonna hit ’em. And I was deeply worried. And I was down in the Caribbean with a friend and this, and I, I was lamenting, I was kind of bummed about it. And she looked at me and she said, Ron, what would you do if Panera owned OBO Pen, the company, the name of the company was Panera, and it owned all those other divisions. And I, I looked at her and I said, you know what, if I had any guts, I’d monetize every asset we have.

00:27:23 Panera is the gem. It could be a nationally dominant company. I would take all the capital from those other businesses. I’d go down there myself and make it, make it work. And I’d bring the best human capital we have. And I’m this kind of person, if I think about something long enough and I say, I’m gonna go do it, I go do it. It took me three months. I made the decision to go do it. I brought the idea to my board. They thought I was crazy. They all had hired on this company called Pen and not Panera, but eventually they gave me the room to do it. It was a bet, your job kind of proposition. And over the next year and a half, we sold every other business. But Panera and Wow. I ended up with Panera, a bunch of cash, maybe 180 stores, and I moved a new wife down to St. Louis, Missouri. And off we went and running Panera

00:28:13 [Speaker Changed] And, and 10 Xed it up to 2000 stores. Which, how long did that take?

00:28:18 [Speaker Changed] Well, I, I will tell you from that point forward, the, the stock was up a hundred fold. Wow. In, in the early, that happened in, I guess 99, early two thousands. You know, you know, I, people would later would say to me, Ron, why didn’t you tell me? And I’d look at him and go, how did I know? I I I look at him and say, yo, what I was telling you, nobody wanted to listen. And the truth of the matter is, I love that for at least a year, you could have bought my stock at three bucks a share. Right. Which is what I was trading at at that point. You could have bought my stock at three bucks a share by the wheelbarrow load.

00:28:56 [Speaker Changed] And what did you have in cash at the time?

00:28:58 [Speaker Changed] A couple hundred million.

00:28:59 [Speaker Changed] So a buck or so in cash. A share of cash. So it was you risking $2? Yeah.

00:29:04 [Speaker Changed] You could have bought it, you know, split adjusted, but you could have bought it. That stock, ultimately three bucks a share, then traded for three 15 when we sold the company 17 years

00:29:13 [Speaker Changed] Later. And that was 7 billion plus, yeah,

00:29:15 [Speaker Changed] 7.8.

00:29:16 [Speaker Changed] Wow. That’s almost 8 billion. And I’m not sure if this is true, according to perplexity, Panera is either Latin or Spanish for breadbasket. Is that right?

00:29:25 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, it was actually an empty vessel where we could put a, a personality into. Okay. So we weren’t looking for a name. You know, there’s no Joey Panera, it’s not my cousin right there. It was really a, a, a vehicle to produce an identity that was rooted in some who were around Panera, no mother bread.

00:29:46 [Speaker Changed] So 99, everything gets sold off. You accumulate all this capital. At what point did you start to get the sense, Hey, this is gonna work. Did it take you

00:29:57 [Speaker Changed] A year or two? No, I know, I actually knew back then, from

00:29:59 [Speaker Changed] Day one, you know,

00:30:01 [Speaker Changed] This can fail me. It’s, it’s, it’s not that it can’t fail, but, but I see something, I can feel it. And you know, my definition as an entrepreneur is I’m, I’m a risk avoider. I’m not a risk seeker. But to me, the greatest risk is blowing a powerful idea, is blowing a market niche that I can see and taste. And it’s, for me, it’s beholden on me to fulfill that. And I can literally remember understanding what we had with Panera back then, and, and knowing what it could become, and knowing we had this obligation to help it fulfill its, its destiny. I could feel it.

00:30:39 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That’s really fascinating. So 2017, you sell out to a, a, a private company.

00:30:46 [Speaker Changed] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, wait. Barry, there we got a few years that we got about. All

00:30:50 [Speaker Changed] Right. So

00:30:50 [Speaker Changed] How 20 years and then, and

00:30:51 [Speaker Changed] So how do we get from 99 to 2017, which is

00:30:54 [Speaker Changed] 20 years, 1500 restaurants and a hundred x in the stock price.

00:31:01 [Speaker Changed] So what was that, tell us about those two decades. What, what, what was it like growing from, you know, 50 stores to 1500 plus?

00:31:11 [Speaker Changed] It was a lot of work and a lot of fun and wonderful people who shared it, who believed in it deeply, who cared about it. It was a focus on the guest. It was a focus on, on, on, on something we call concept essence. This brand’s role in the world. And, and, and quite frankly, we, we really over those roughly 20 years, stayed highly disciplined. We were never about liquidity. We were never about trying to sell any, sell the company. We were about running a great company for our guests, producing high com store sales through good days, through the great recession, going through all those ups and downs. And we stayed true to that. We ended up having very strong comp store sales, very high ROIs. And we ended up, you know, building a, a massive organization. What

00:32:04 [Speaker Changed] Was the biggest challenge during that ramp up? ’cause we have all seen companies either over expand or expand into the wrong food categories or the wrong geographies. Like how challenging is that process knowing that, hey, either this is great or it’s a disaster. There’s almost nothing in the middle.

00:32:25 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, I, I, I, you know, it’s really funny to me, running a a, a company, whether small or a very large company, is all about discipline and not getting ahead of your skis. I never wanted to be a company that had to go through layoffs. I never wanted to be a company that had to close stores. I ne so I kept trying to say, how do we run this thing with discipline on what matters that is satisfying the guest in a way none of our competitors could. How do we create differentiation? Competitive is everything. How do we create an experience other people can’t do with food? Other people can’t provide with, with a, a culture and, and a, an experience when you walk in the store that other people weren’t offering. And it was that, that, that focus on that, that, that never broke in those 20 years. And I think anybody who worked for me knew that.

00:33:17 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That’s really fascinating. So now, 1500 stores, 17 years later,

00:33:24 [Speaker Changed] Maybe it was 1700 stores, but keep going.

00:33:26 [Speaker Changed] Okay. So you’re missing

00:33:27 [Speaker Changed] A few hundred stores,

00:33:28 [Speaker Changed] Almost, almost 2000 stores today. Yeah. What led you just to decide, all right, these guys really wanna throw a dumb amount of money at me, I’ll take it.

00:33:37 [Speaker Changed] Well, we have to, we have to make one stop along the way. Okay. So I, you know, as I told you, I have this other love politics and trying to fix the world. And I, I fundamentally believe as in business, the ability to think long term is what was the key to an era and the way we approached it. I also think that in, in our civic society, being able to think long term and, and come together as a country is powerful. I, I would often think that Chinese have 20 year plans. Yeah. And, you know, we can’t agree on a budget for 20 months. And today we can’t agree on tariffs for 20 hours. But, but, but the truth in the matter is, back in, in oh eight and oh nine, I, I felt this desire to take what I’d learned in running large organizations and apply it in, in, in civic society.

00:34:24 And I, I had some discussions with the Obama administration. I couldn’t step down to do that ’cause of my commitment to Panera. And I made the decision. I wanted to step down, jump off the high diving board and see what it felt like applying myself elsewhere. I made that decision. I stepped down as CEO stayed as executive chairman. I created something called Panera Cares, which were these cafes, shared cafes of shared responsibility, no set prices. It was quite an interesting experiment in humanity. We opened five of them. I also went off and helped co formm an organization called No Labels, which was about reducing again, the hyperpartisan. Oh,

00:35:04 [Speaker Changed] I recall. No labels. Yeah. I didn’t realize

00:35:05 [Speaker Changed] That I was one of the, the folks that were really the founders of that. Huh. And, and I’m, I’m out as executive chair for about a year or two, and I was still doing acquisitions. I was still the largest shareholder and doing some consumer work. And I came back one weekend around 2010, 11, and I sat down at a computer and I wrote a vision for how I would compete with Panera. And that vision essentially called for digital access. None of that existed in 2011. It called for loyalty. Very little of it was in this country. Tesco had formed it in the UK to come to Kroger. We call it for loyalty. We call for omni loyalty.

00:35:42 [Speaker Changed] Meaning like reward system.

00:35:44 [Speaker Changed] Reward system. Yes. Yeah. How do you find a way to build a deeper personal connection with guests? It called for clean food, free of all artificial chemicals, preservatives,

00:35:57 [Speaker Changed] And the light minimal processing. Yes and no, and very little additives, if any, if

00:36:01 [Speaker Changed] Any. Exactly. And then on omnichannel approach, and I brought this, this memo into my very dear friend gentleman. I love Bill Morton, who was our CEO. He’d been my CFO for two decades. And, and I shared it with Bill, and he took a look at it and said, would you go work on it? And I said, you know, I, I would. And I, I, a year later, the executive chairman is working 80 me. I’m working 80 hours a week, having the time of my life building up a, a prototype for technology and digital access and clean food. And, and, and Bill comes to me and says he can’t travel when I come back as CEO. We, we fought over for about a year. I didn’t really want to come back and, and, and, and, and do what I had done as CEO, but he couldn’t travel and it was required. So I came back as CEOI put all that plan in place. It was horrific.

00:36:57 [Speaker Changed] At Panera. At

00:36:57 [Speaker Changed] Panera, yeah.

00:36:58 [Speaker Changed] And, and it did not work.

00:36:59 [Speaker Changed] No, no. Wait, I spent 150 million. It was the, the transformation was huge. Okay.

00:37:04 [Speaker Changed] So it did work.

00:37:04 [Speaker Changed] Oh, well, let me get there. I mean, I had activists along the way. One of my partners in Act three today was the activist who attacked me. I, I had a lot of fun with him. I could never tell anybody. I actually respected him name Noah Elbogen. Okay. But I, I couldn’t tell anybody that. But I actually grew to like him. And today he works with me. But, but at any rate, so those years, 2000 14, 15, 16, anytime you go through transformation, anytime you change something, and this was probably the largest transformation in a large public restaurant company. It was difficult. I remember when we were driving technology we’re the first real restaurant technology in an integrated way. Again, i I used to call technology the social security of Panera. It was only a matter of time till it was a hundred percent of our, our revenue.

00:37:53 Right. Right. And, and, and we were, we were committed to this. And we did it. By 2016, our comps were pushing double digits again. Wow. EBITDA was up 35%. The company was rocking. Starbucks made an approach to us to buy us that, that didn’t, we’d go forward. And in 2017, the leadership of jb, which was a European money manager, came calling and, and, and they had fallen in love. And frankly, I, my my view of a business is I spend all of my time building it. But when somebody’s in love, that always provides the opportunity to harvest.

00:38:34 [Speaker Changed] So Starbucks comes knocking, were they offering a stock deal? Was it remotely close to the nearly 8 billion that JB came up with?

00:38:44 [Speaker Changed] If you read my book, you read the whole story, but, but I think the Starbucks deal was around two 40 a share. The JB deal was done at three 15 ish year.

00:38:56 [Speaker Changed] Much more aggressive numbers

00:38:57 [Speaker Changed] Six months after the Starbucks discussions. Right. And frankly, the Starbucks discussions didn’t, didn’t, didn’t reach conclusion. It was at that point that Howard was making his own decisions about stepping down in, in replacing himself with Kevin Johnson. And my sense is they did not want to take on an acquisition like Panera at that moment. So our, our stock price got ahead of itself. They couldn’t do the deal. So the Starbucks deal didn’t, didn’t go forward.

00:39:26 [Speaker Changed] Right. But at the very least, it’s set a floor for future discussions with whomever. Well,

00:39:31 [Speaker Changed] It wasn’t public. So we had a, we, I, to be honest with you, yeah. We, we had had this, these discussions at two 40 a share at Starbucks. It, it didn’t go forward. And when we began with jb, and again, you can read the book, it, you know, I think it started in, in the high two hundreds, by the time we were done, they were paying three 15

00:39:53 [Speaker Changed] For it. Wow. And the book is Know what Matters. Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations. Alright, so let’s talk about act three, which I don’t mean that in the Shakespearean sense, but you launched Act three holdings to invest in new brands. Tell us about the motivations for that.

00:40:11 [Speaker Changed] Well, after I, I had sold Panera, I didn’t know where I was headed. There was discussion with JB about joining them as a partner. And, and, and

00:40:21 [Speaker Changed] This is the big European investment shop that took, took over Panera.

00:40:25 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. But I, it wasn’t for me. And, and I was doing a bunch of speaking about the pervasive short-termism in our capital markets and, and how I thought it had been, it had a untoward impact, frankly, on innovation and, and GDP growth. And, and one of my now partners and who’ve been my chief concept officer at Panera was a gentleman named Keith Pascal. And he, he said, why? Why, why don’t you take some of your money? You’ve made all this money. Why don’t you take some of it and, and, and, and, and, and invest it in the long-term with a long-term focus. And I, I thought about it and I was, I had been outta Panera about two months at this point. And I, I actually had an idea. And, and, and the idea I had, it was a company, I, I I, I basically had had deep belief that the Mediterranean category had the potential to be the next major culinary category. Huh.

00:41:23 [Speaker Changed] That’s really interesting. Oh,

00:41:25 [Speaker Changed] It’s obvious. I mean, it was the number one diet in America, right? Mediterranean, every time you went to the doctor, they were doing a commercial for Mediterranean. It’s bold flavors, but it’s flavors that feel safe. It’s also craveable wellness. It’s healthy, it’s good for you and it tastes good. And it was very clear this category had power. And I had made an investment in a very small company in, in, in the D-V-M-D-M-V, which was down in DC called Kava when it was two restaurants. I knew them. And I had another restaurant company as I, as I had left, Panera approach me, called Zoe’s asked me if I would join their board. They’d gimme warrants of, you know, in 10% of the company or something to see if I could help them compete. And, and I, I looked at ’em and I thought to myself, wow.

00:42:17 And, and at the same time, kava, the guys at Kava asked me if I joined their board. And I thought to myself, you know, this is an industry, the food industry in which in every major category winner takes all. Yep. And you know, you can talk McDonald’s and Burger King, Panera and, and Corner Bakery. You can talk Chipotle and Cordoba. And I said, somebody’s gonna win a Mediterranean and there is a powerful potential to, to take Zoe’s to buy this company. Zoe’s, which was about 250 restaurants, take the culinary skills of kava, merge ’em together, and end up with the, you know, clearly 10 x dominant player in the Mediterranean category. And I, I thought I might do this. Well, kava asked me to join their board. I I I, I went to their CEO Brett Schulman with this idea. And, and I said, and he said, before you, you know, you better talk to my board about it. I went to a meeting with the board. I pitched them on the idea of, of buying a company five times larger and then merging with them. Ultimately they asked, they wanted to do the acquisition. I agreed to finance the dealer at least half of the capital. They needed about 150 million I put into it. And I became, you know, one of their very largest shareholders. And I became chairman of the company.

00:43:37 [Speaker Changed] And, and how large is Kava today?

00:43:40 [Speaker Changed] Well, it went public about 18 months ago. It stock is, was up as high as seven x since the IPO. It’s now up five x. It’s a, it was as, it’s a $10 billion market cap company. It traded as high as 16 billion. It’s perceived by the market, frankly, as has the potential to be the next Chipotle, the next Panera. It’s a powerful brand with an amazing management team led by Brett Schulman. And I’m pleased to say we’ve been able to help them along the way, know what they needed to do to become the kind of great company it is today.

00:44:22 [Speaker Changed] Let, let me push back a little bit on winner take all, even though I’m a big believer in that as a reality, but McDonald’s seems to have gotten kind of old and stale and along comes Shake Shack and a dozen other five guys and down the Yeah. And it suddenly seems like in the burger space as an example, there’s increasing com competition and it’s no longer Mickey D’s as the only winner. Is that just what happens eventually? Or what’s your perspective on it? Well,

00:44:58 [Speaker Changed] First let me, let me share with you something Danny Meyer, who’s the brilliant Yeah. Chairman, very dear friend of chairman Oh really? Of Shake Shack. He’s a dear friend, but my son actually works at Shake Shack in, in, in operations. And so I, I have great affinity for those guys. But, but here’s the truth. McDonald’s is worth what, 75 billion, a hundred billion. I mean, it’s, it’s got a a, a huge market cap. There isn’t another hamburger business that’s got a market cap anywhere near that. And that’s what we’re talking about.

00:45:31 [Speaker Changed] But they got a 65 year head start, 75 year head start over.

00:45:36 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, that’s what I mean. Shack winner takes all, when you have a position of dominance in a category, you win. Now you can be niched and niches come along and they redefine themselves and they can in themselves become a category. But ultimately this is an industry in which scale matters. Sure. It matters as you spread the overhead and it’s a winner take all industry.

00:45:57 [Speaker Changed] I’m, I’m looking at a lot of the big winners of the past, and I know they’re all different industries, whether it’s General Electric or Sears, or Whoa, whoa, whoa. Or

00:46:09 [Speaker Changed] Retailers. You’re, you’re a great investor and a smart man, but you’re confusing two things. Yeah. One dominance of a category, and then what happens to businesses as they lose their competitive advantage. Exactly. So let me share with you a principle that was very clear to me. When businesses form it requires a powerful, powerful effort by somebody to discover a better alternative. Because you have no scale. You gotta get customers to walk across the street. You, you have no purchasing, no ability access to capital. When a business starts to get some success, because it’s actually worked, capital comes in and as capital comes in, people began to say, you know, we know you’ve discovered something better, but we need to figure out how to be more efficient, how to run it better. And what ultimately happens is you bring in what we would call discover delivery people. Delivery people are about improving the margins, about purchasing, about financial planning. And often in, in companies, and particularly in my industry, as they approach a billion dollars, the, the, the discovery people in the delivery people, they, they ultimately do well together. At the beginning, the margins get better, but ultimately there’s conflict and friction. Sure. The, the language of discovery is the language of, could you imagine, let’s try this, what would happen if it’s poetry? The language of delivery is financial planning. Prove it to me. I wanna see the numbers. I don’t believe it.

00:47:39 [Speaker Changed] Logistics

00:47:40 [Speaker Changed] Numbers. It’s, it’s, it’s gotta be proven. And what ends up happening is the delivery capabilities of most companies drive out the discovery capabilities. Huh. And companies that were once very effective, they become more and more reliant on efficiency. And what happens typically in many companies is they get very good, very efficient at doing what the marketplace wanted from them five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And not very effective at figuring out what the consumer of tomorrow wants.

00:48:14 [Speaker Changed] There’s a wonderful Paul Graham quote that goes, all experts are experts in the way the world used to be.

00:48:21 [Speaker Changed] Exactly. And, and so my point to you is, is once we define the categories, dominance matters, somebody will own the reason the, the, the market is paying upwards of, has been paying upwards of $15 billion a valuation on kava. This thing is 400 restaurants. I mean, we’ve, we’ve had valuations of 30 to $40 million of restaurant. What is the market paying for? They’re paying for the future. They’re paying for an expectation that this business will, will, will take form as one of the great companies in this country. The question that, that’s dominance of a category. Now the challenge to the team at, at kava is staying on that edge. Staying on that wave is continuing to discover, which is why the role of CEO and so many companies, in my view, is to be the innovator in chief and lead that discovery. Because if the CEO isn’t doing it, it isn’t gonna happen.

00:49:20 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That’s really interesting. So I wanna talk about some of the companies that Act Three has invested in, but let’s get a little broader view. Te tell us about Act three. What are you doing? What’s the philosophy here?

00:49:32 [Speaker Changed] Well, so after we, we, we helped form the modern kava and, and invested in that. I had also had a, had a company I had bought for Panera called Tate, which a large stake in it with its founder Zor. When I, when I left Panera, I, I took with me Panera’s interest in Pan, in, in, in Tate. And we decided to, to take our own money, I took, you know, roughly a quarter of a billion dollars of my own money and number of people who decided to join me. They, they co-invested and we decided to put that money to work investing in, in growth companies with a couple of very simple principles. The number one principle was founder friendly capital. We think that in growth concepts, the last thing they need to do is do fundraising as if it’s an annual lifecycle event. You know, literally the last thing that needs to happen is, is money raising needs to an annual event.

00:50:37 So we come along and we make an investment, hopefully at a reasonable valuation, but we then take a right of first refusal with a pre-agreed to valuation multiple on all follow on rounds. And we’ve never turned that down. Wow. So all of our investments know that they essentially never have to raise money again, don’t have to worry about it. So all the money’s there, it’s already pre-negotiated. It also allows us to consolidate up our, our position. That’s principle one. It’s common stock and no dilutive, no pref terms. Number two, we practice what we call Sherpa management. So almost every private equity firm that makes investments, their people are financial. They’re in the boardroom often asking what the next liquidity event is. Of our 25 people, only one of them is financially Dr. Driven, as I said, Noah Elbogen, our former activist, everybody else, our senior C-Suite executives.

00:51:31 I’ve got a guy who’s opened 5,000 retail stores. Wow. I’ve got another guy who’s my partner, Dwight Juin, who was, was with us for 20 years and really invented fast casual. My joke with him is from his brain to my lips, I make the speech. He’s the one who does the thinking. We have another partner, Chuck Chapman, who’s extraordinary, was with Darden, was with Berkshire Hathaway and Dairy Queen was with Bruger, was president, was my, on my board was the CEO of Panera. He’s great at scaling and building these businesses. I’ve got a, a major technology group that has the capability of, of, of, of knowing what’s gonna work in three years. And any rate, when we’re sitting in a a boardroom, we’re there as a Sherpa and, and I have a simple expression, building a nationally dominant business is tougher than climbing Mount Everest.

00:52:27 Very few people ever do it. Nobody goes up Mount Everest without a, a Sherpa. Why don’t you understand that? You’ll be well-served if you have a Sherpa as you build a nationally dominant company. When we’re in that boardroom, we’re talking to management about how to make sure they don’t fall off the side of the mountain. How they don’t make sure they don’t trip up and fall. And frankly, we’ve been very successful in helping build these dominant companies in these core categories. And then, and then last, Barry, the last principle, as I told you when we began talking, we believe deeply in competitive advantage. We only invest where we have competitive advantage. What Act three is really good at is we have hundreds of years of pattern recognition in this industry. We know what categories are gonna have a wind at their back, and we know how to help these companies build the dominant position in that category. And frankly, we now are involved with seven companies. We’ve yet to have anything other than, than a huge success.

00:53:30 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That, that’s really fascinating. Let’s talk quickly about two of the companies that you’ve in invested in besides Kava. One is Life Alive and the other is Level 99. Tell us about those.

00:53:42 [Speaker Changed] Sure. So Life Alive is positive eating. Look at 40% of America is trying to eat better. The question is, where do you go to do that? How do you do it? This is mostly vegetables. It’s really good. We’ve owned it for seven or eight years. We’ve nurtured it, cared for it, watch the grow. Very high volume today. Somebody’s gonna own the Plant Forward category. We hope that this is the concept that’s the dominant player in that.

00:54:10 [Speaker Changed] And level 99. Level

00:54:12 [Speaker Changed] Nine is another interesting one. This is immersive social entertainment. It’s 40,000 square feet of challenges. It was created, it’s 40,000 square feet of challenges with a farm to table restaurant and a brewery in the middle of it. It was created by a gentleman named Matt De Plessy. We met Matt before he opened one of them. He’s out of Harvard, out of MIT Harvard Business School and spent 20 years working with Disney and, and, and their folks very experienced in entertainment. He had the vision for this business. We put up the capital. We’re we’re partners in it with him. And it, it is stunning to go to one of these. We’re in Natick, Massachusetts. We’re in Providence, Rhode Island. We’re opening in, in Disney World. We’re opening in Tyson’s Corner. Wow. And this summer you’ll see us in locations across America. This is a kind of business. We’ll have 3000 people on a Saturday night. It’s an unbelievable experience. And, and with, with extraordinary margins, it may be one of the best businesses I’ve ever been involved in.

00:55:18 [Speaker Changed] Wow. That’s amazing. All right, I only have you for a few moments, so let’s jump to our speed round. Five quick questions, 30 seconds each. Starting with what’s keeping you entertained these days? What are you streaming or watching or listening to? Well, what’s

00:55:33 [Speaker Changed] Keeping me entertained is my kids. Yeah. I have a 26-year-old and a 21-year-old. But what I’m watching, the thing I just finished was watching White Lotus was my son. I loved it. I mean, we have a, a house on, at an island called Juby Bay off of Antigua. And it reminds us of where we live and just what really goes on between people is always the most fascinating to me. I love people.

00:55:55 [Speaker Changed] Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

00:55:59 [Speaker Changed] I don’t know if anybody helped shape me, but, but I would say Lou Kane, who was 25 years, my senior and my partner of many years, taught me what it meant to, to be a standup guy. I loved this man. He was a huge influence. I also would say my dad, who was a CPA, but again, knew how to deal with people, talk to people, care about people, and I respected him as a business person.

00:56:25 [Speaker Changed] What about books? What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?

00:56:29 [Speaker Changed] Oh goodness. I la last night I was reading a book on Australia. Yeah. I’m, I’m going to Australia with my daughter in two weeks. So I, I, I skimm read that. But, but I, I, I’m, I, I tend, you know, I’m, I’m, I just reread Daniel Kaman passed away, I think I’m pronouncing his name right. But he, he wrote Fast and Slow. Slow Slow

00:56:52 [Speaker Changed] Thinking. Fast and Slow. Danny Conman. Yeah.

00:56:54 [Speaker Changed] I, I had read it years ago. I’m, I just reread it again. I love it. It’s behavioral economics, behavioral finance. It’s about how people work. And to me, my life probably, if there’s one thing that’s that, that’s a central organizing principle is trying to figure out what makes people tick.

00:57:10 [Speaker Changed] Huh. Really interesting. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in food service or franchising?

00:57:22 [Speaker Changed] I’d say I’d say, get out and, and, and, and understand what it is to be an operator. Understand what it is to run a business. The action isn’t in the office, it’s not in the support center, the action’s in the field, it’s in the stores. And most importantly, my advice to you is figure out not the right career path, but figure out what you, what you care about, what you can do well, and then go do it.

00:57:46 [Speaker Changed] And our final question, what do you know about the world of building a restaurant, for lack of a better word, empire today that might have been useful back in the late eighties?

00:57:59 [Speaker Changed] Trust yourself. Really. You know, I think some of you know guys like me. I don’t know. I, I always, you know, you second guess, you wonder, you listen to every advisor. And one of the things you, you, you gain with a little more age is a perspective that I actually knew what I was doing. Staying focused on that customer, staying focused on, on, on the, on, on the end of delivering a better guest experience and understanding the byproduct would be financial success. It wasn’t the end.

00:58:28 [Speaker Changed] Thanks Ron, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Ron Sheik. He is the former CEO and chairman of Panera Bread and Oor, pa, and all those other companies. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any of the 550 we’ve done over the past 11 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to check out my new bestselling book, how Not to invest the ideas, numbers, and behaviors that destroy wealth and how to avoid them, how not to invest wherever you find your favorite books. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. John Wasserman is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcast here at Bloomberg. I’m Barry ols. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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